Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes
by Grotesk Burlesque
Summary: Three years after a coup by a faction within the Government, Britain is under the thumb of the brutal Regime. When a prominent advisor to the dictatorship defects with the location of a missing political prisoner, the Opposition—now the Resistance—finds itself in possession of a few unlikely allies and hurtling towards a war that could tear the country apart.
1. A blindness that touches perfection

_[A/N: AO3 has spoiled me with its warning and tagging system, so I'll add it here, I guess. Warnings for the following: Major character death, violence, torture, an awful lot of language that might be referred to as "violent sexual imagery," actual sex not all of which is emotionally healthy, dystopia, and far too many OCs. Also I'm not British. If none of that puts you off, enjoy!—GB]_

The girl sat, as she always did, in her favourite chair by the window, her back straight and her hands folded in her lap, atop her hospital gown. The afternoon light, diffuse and wan, was a line of white gold that travelled across stray strands of her hair to grace her still features.

Abby Nkeng, the day nurse, greeted her, but the girl continued to stare straight ahead, her milky eyes fixed on a point beyond Abby, beyond the far wall that demarcated the confines of her small, quiet existence.

"Shall I brush your hair?" Abby asked, though a response wouldn't come, and besides, she'd already begun doing it. The girl's hair was long and full, as devoid of colour as her eyes were empty of life. "I hear you're expecting a visitor today." The man's real name was well above Abby's level of security clearance, but it was impossible not to recognize him from the television, though he looked much smaller in person, much older. Abby, who'd seen what was left of her family deported, was wise enough not to let on that she knew who he was.

She was good at playing the ignorant foreigner (she had been born and raised in Tower Hamlets) to the point where most believed she was as dull-witted as her sole remaining patient. Officially, the long-term care facility had closed two years ago; unofficially, the lone survivor of the chemical weapons attack that had killed the last democratically elected Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland marked out her remaining days in a small room on the top floor, her name and identity as vanished as her mind.

Abby knew some of the story. They called it the White Death, and normally, it was instantaneous and deadly. The photographs of the bleached corpses had never been seen outside of the Regime's inner circle, though she always pictured them as marble statues, like the girl, frozen in their seats. There had been one first, failed attack, the canister cracking prematurely and killing the terrorist who'd carried it, and one on the PM during a press conference. The girl, fifteen at the time, ought to have been at school, but her father had wanted her to stand in the background with several other teenagers to lend support to the government's newest educational initiative. The ones who died that day were luckier than she was.

The war that followed, with its dirty bombs and its savage reprisals, was no longer spoken about.

The visitor came once a week, when his schedule allowed, and he would take up the plastic chair in the corner and sit across from the girl, and talk to her. Abby would excuse herself, politely, avoiding the man's gaze, and leave them alone. She didn't know what the man talked about. She knew only that the girl wouldn't answer, not this afternoon, and not ever; she was a corpse, kept clean and fed and bearing the markers of the living by the work of Abby's hands. In the language of the current climate, she was a mental defective, condemned to a second, actual death.

For all that, she was terribly beautiful.

Abby felt a kinship with the girl. She, too, was a carefully guarded exception to the rule. The visitor felt that the girl responded well to her, and so there was a special chip on her identification that she was to ask the soldiers to scan if they stopped her. She had not been herded, like cattle, onto a boat along with the rest of her surviving family. Legally, she was a non-person, but what else but a non-person could serve a ghost?

Just before the visitor was due to arrive, the girl went into a convulsion, tumbling from her chair and jerking on the floor, her bloodless lips foaming. Abby turned her onto her side, and that was when the man stepped through the door.

The girl twisted, vomited, and it caught the tip of the visitor's loafer.

_This is it, _Abby thought. _This is how I die._ He'd never witnessed one of her spells before; he would have her fired from her job, disappeared, crammed onto a leaky boat destined for some African shithole, thrown out the door of an aeroplane gliding above the Atlantic. This glimpse of the horror that lived within the girl's ivory chrysalis would condemn her to irrelevancy. Abby was a secret keeper, and the secret was writhing on the ground, spluttering and pissing herself, all in front of the man who had singlehandedly ushered in a new era of stability and order, the most powerful man in the entire country.

She didn't expect him to kneel beside the girl, remove a handkerchief from the pocket of his suit jacket, and clean the frothing corners of her mouth.

She didn't expect, when he at last looked up at Abby, to see tears in his eyes.

"Will she live?"

Abby nodded, then sensing further explanation was needed, said, "She does this often. It's…her condition. I'll get her cleaned up."

His suit must have cost a year of Abby's salary, but he nevertheless kept his hand on the girl's shoulder until her seizure had passed, and helped Abby get her back into the chair afterwards.

"You tell no one," he said. "You tell fucking no one, do you understand?"

Abby raised a finger to her lips. It seemed she and the girl had both been spared. He wiped moisture from his cheek, and with it, any semblance of human emotion.

It was his cruelties that defined him, but his acts of mercy that would undo him every time.


	2. London Calling From the Underground

The woman, shrouded in a black overcoat with a black headscarf tied over her pale hair might have been a Hollywood starlet promenading down the French Riviera or a femme fatale in an old spy movie. With the nervous air of either of the above, she glanced at the security cameras that tracked her every step as she braced herself against the chill. She'd stopped just short of black sunglasses—combined with the scarf, and even in the dead of winter, they might be construed as a disguise, as nefarious intent. She kept her head down in the hopes that no one would see her, and her hand on her identification papers in case someone did.

She froze in the beam of a searchlight that seemed to pause as it passed over her. Shuddered. This wasn't the London she knew, but it was the one she'd—albeit unwittingly—helped create.

Not many businesses were open an hour before the beginning of curfew, so the warm yellow beacon of a café that catered mainly to the Regime's minor functionaries and cronies stood apart from rows of darkened and shuttered windows. Late-night meetings, at the very doorstep of the enemy, were a risk, but she was already a wanted woman. Despite the cold, the note that she held between two of her fingers was damp with her sweat.

The bells above the door announced her arrival. He was already waiting for her. She slipped into the booth across from him. There was a table of men in suits talking loudly near the back but a wide moat of space around the booth; she hoped they looked uninteresting, just two model citizens, blandly attractive cogs in the apparatus, meeting for a nightcap after a work day that had gone on hours too long.

"Internet porn," he said as she adjusted her skirt before sitting.

"You said that last time," she said, "and the time before. Shawarma."

"That's a good one." Almost apologetically: "_The Daily Show._ Hullo, Emma."

"Hi Ollie." It was the game they played every time they met. She didn't bother telling him that if he weren't completely bollocks with computers, he might still be able to get internet porn, at least from overseas. Maybe even _The Daily Show, _if it was still on the air, though she suspected he didn't miss that nearly as much.

For three years, she'd lived for these exchanges, and their secret language of lost luxuries that stood in for what she really missed. She remembered their constant break-ups and nearly romantic reunions, their passionate and embarrassingly public shouting matches as if in a book she'd read as a child. Hard as it was to imagine, there had been a time when the worst he had to fear was a bollocking from the director of communications, back when a leak could only cost them their careers.

Emma buried the thought alongside the names she dared not speak, names of men and women in all likelihood buried in unmarked mass graves, and cleared her throat. No point in stalling. "I want to come in," she said.

His response was a faint echo of the high-pitched giggle she'd once first found annoying, then endearing, then annoying again. "What makes you think I have anything to do with that?"

"Don't be coy, Ollie. It doesn't suit you." She adjusted the scarf, twisted the fringed corner of the fabric between her fingertips. "I can pay."

"They're not after money." For the sake of plausible deniability, he added, "I don't think."

"I didn't mean money." Her volume dropped abruptly as the server came around to collect their orders. She'd have to add _decent coffee_ to her list; she settled for tea over the utter toxic instant shit that the Regime must have stockpiled before the embargo. Then, very deliberately _not_ glancing at the table at the back, she reached into the pocket and retrieved the yellow Post-It note. There were two letters, and a string of numbers, written on it, the blue ink already beginning to bleed.

"Oh," and that awful laugh again, "Oh, no, no. Just how fucking stupid do you think I am?" When her mouth opened, Ollie added, "No, don't even answer that. How stupid do you think _they _are?"

"Would you," she tried, "at least, for one time in your life, _attempt_ to be something like a decent human being and pass that along to those people you have _nothing to do with_ anymore so that maybe, just maybe, they can make up their _own_ minds what they want to do about this?"

"It's a trap," he replied, and it was a measure of his seriousness in this regard that he didn't even make the obvious _Star Wars_ reference.

"It is." She'd known that, naturally, from the moment it started, with Weber's heavy mitt on her shoulder, _Miss Messinger, I'd like you to come for a ride with me._ "Of course it is. But it isn't just a trap for your non-friends. They know I've been talking."

"Why should I care?" He was suddenly agitated, though, and she frowned. Despite what she'd often said—and the considered opinion of the aforementioned communications director—Ollie wasn't entirely stupid. But when he was backed into a corner, he got sloppy, and sloppiness was the last thing either of them needed now. If she was compromised, he could very well be compromised as well, with his cozy appointment at a corporation subcontracted to mine surveillance camera data, and his unofficial position as a purveyor of highly sensitive information to government and terrorists alike. He could, like her, find himself trapped between the Regime and a Resistance whose interests were almost certainly best served by a quick and simple bullet to the head.

"I'm not much use to anyone in a black cell, am I? Either way, it's over. But you can perhaps not be a complete tosser about it." She clasped her hands—bits of scarf still threaded through her fingers—so tightly together that they whitened. "I was there, by the way, if you care at all. They took me down to the cells and _showed_ me."

She could hear him trying, and mostly succeeding, in controlling his breathing. She had to admit that he was doing better than she was. Maybe he had grown up a little after all. "Why?"

"They knew I'd come running to you. And they wanted me to be convincing." She sighed. "I've been honest. I always was. I can't take it anymore. Your friends can make their own decisions." She shoved the Post-It across the table, desperate to be rid of it. Her sticky pad, that she insisted on keeping even in the age of tablets and smartphones, had been in her blazer pocket. It had come with her, sat there against her heart while she _watched,_ and after she'd GPS'd the coordinates and written them down on the top leaf, her hands shaking so badly that her pen had gone right through the paper in places. "Ollie," she tried again, "It was terrible. No one…no one deserves that."

For the first time, an expression—carefully practiced, she knew better than to trust him even now—that resembled sympathy crossed his face. Despite her misgivings, it was enough to crack open the floodgates. Sympathy, these days, was a rarer commodity than good coffee _or_ shawarma. She curled in on herself, buried her face in her arms, and sobbed.

"Emma? Oh _fuck,_ Emma, don't do this here. Not now. Come on." She heard change clattering at the table and then he was at her side, lifting her to her feet, his body between her and their potential audience in the interest of not making a scene. He said, loudly enough for the men in the back and the staff of two to overhear, if they so desired, "Your da's not dead yet, is he? It's a wonder what people can come back from these days."

She sniffled, wiped her eyes and nose on her sleeve, and chose to interpret his words as acquiescence.

"Can I come home with you?" she asked, the perfect picture of the perfect, grieving daughter. "I don't want to be alone tonight."

He rolled his eyes, but nodded. His arm around her, he led her out into the street. A searchlight spun across them, just as he lifted her chin so that her tearstained face was just below his, a mockery of a normal young couple, in a normal time. "I'll never get used to those," Ollie muttered, squinting against the burst of white, their shadows black against a massive electronic billboard sporting a portrait of the Chancellor posed before a fluttering Union Jack.

"Maybe you won't need to." When the sweep had passed, he started walking, still keeping her close to him. The night seemed somehow warmer than it had when she'd arrived.

"Can't believe you're crying over—your da. He'd laugh at you, you know. Or worse."

"Yeah," she said. "But I can't do nothing. Not anymore."

"Fine time to grow a conscience, Emma."

They kept walking, his own flat well in the opposite direction, and she told herself that gripping his arm had everything to do with appearances and was nothing at all like the way a drowning woman might cling to a life raft.

The city, cleaner and crueler than it had ever been, took no further notice of them.

* * *

Ollie said little as they walked—not that she would have expected him too, except that silence, coming from him, was unnerving as all hell—beyond asking her several times if she was _sure._ She was. Her feet were aching in her heels when they finally reached a condemned townhouse near one of Exclusion Zones. She followed him inside, and up the creaking stairs, into what had been a child's bedroom. He tugged open the bottom drawer of a battered wooden dresser. There, neatly folded, were several hazmat suits. He retrieved one, handed it to her.

"White's not really your colour," he said, "but it'll have to do."

"You're serious."

"Last chance to back out."

She thought about the cells, the way the screaming echoed through the narrow hallways. Better an elevated risk of cancer, better the merciful kiss of the White Death, than spending the rest of her life in one of those cells. She zipped the suit over her clothes, then fastened the gas mask he passed her over her face.

"Are you my mummy?" Ollie's voice, muffled by his own mask. She couldn't make herself so much as smile.

They stood at the rim of a crater, the ground jagged with twisted rebar and piles of rubble. No one guarded this Exclusion Zone; there were signs posted, and barbed wire, but enough gaps in the fence that slipping through was easy. Even the stupidest of London's most downtrodden wasn't thick enough to live here. Between the shambling house and the entrance to the Tube, well past the safe no-man's land with its battered radiation symbols, they didn't encounter a single human being. It occurred to Emma that the Regime already knew where the Resistance bases were, and was just waiting patiently for them to poison themselves.

Ollie pushed his mask above his face as they descended the stairs into the station; Emma didn't feel nearly so confident that the air in the Underground was breathable. She balked, too, when he hopped onto the track, though she knew as well as he did that no trains had passed through this station in three years.

For the last long hour of their journey, he didn't speak a single word.

Just when she was about ready to lie down on the track and die, he at last knocked on what looked like a maintenance room door, two short raps and a pause, then another quick three. She heard a lock unlatch, saw the sliver of a girl's face before the door opened all the way.

"Suits off," the girl said. "Dump them by the front. You can bring in the masks, though."

Emma's long hair was tangled up in the gas mask straps, and she was having trouble with the zipper, realizing belatedly that it wasn't the zipper but her hands, shaking again, and Ollie grunted in frustration and did it for her, sparing her the joke at how it'd never been that hard for him to undress her in the past. She stepped out of the puddle of white and through the door, to a scene of half a dozen grim, grubby young men and women seated on old couches and chairs, jugs of bottled water stacked up to the ceiling behind them.

"Is it safe?" Emma asked.

"It stopped being safe the moment you opened your gob to Ollie," the girl snapped. "You won't die of radiation or the gas, if that's what you're wondering. The Regime wants you to think it's worse out here than it is."

"I've seen environmental reports."

"Sure. Wait here. Ollie?"

He followed the girl through another door, and Emma stood in the centre of the room, hands folded in front of her, avoiding the stares of the assembled rebels, keenly aware of how clean and well-fed she was by comparison, how fucking _posh._ How far she'd fallen, to end up _here._

It was muffled, but it sounded like shouting was happening on the other side of the door. After long minutes, Ollie emerged, a look of dejection on his face that she hadn't seen in—when had it been? Maybe the night of the coup.

"She'll see you now," he said to her, and then slumped on one of the couches.

And in Emma went. This room really _was_ a maintenance cupboard; there would have been mops hanging off the walls except those had been cleared out in favour of a map of London and surroundings, showing the Exclusion Zones and Xs that she thought might refer to bombings. Incongruously, the room's only other decoration was a photo of a young couple, the man tall and gaunt and grinning, the woman pretty and dark-haired, a softer, sweeter version of the Patty Hearst impersonation sitting behind the desk.

"Shut the door," the woman—and Emma knew her, couldn't place her, but she definitely reminded her of _someone_—said. Emma did. The woman had a quiet voice, but it was the voice of someone not to be fucked with. "You know your life's over, don't you?"

"Ollie said as much."

"We can speak freely. Do you know who I am?"

Emma thought back to parties, conferences. Who _was_ she? "The leader of the Resistance?" she tried.

The woman laughed. "God, no. You think we'd let you anywhere near the leadership? You really don't remember me, do you?"

"Sorry, no."

"Call me Sam."

"Okay, Sam. I'm—"

"I know who you are. Ollie showed me your little note." Sam stood, her black jumper clinging to every sharp angle of her bony frame, and turned to the map. Pointed to a pushpin by the Exclusion Zone that oozed over Barking and Dagenham. "The old Ford plant is a black site, according to you."

Emma nodded, and Sam motioned for her to sit down. Sam did as well, though it didn't make her presence any less looming. (Which didn't seem right; she wasn't tall enough to loom. And yet there she was, somehow managing it.)

"Now that you've been down here," Sam said, "You stay here, until we're satisfied that you can be trusted and that you're not entirely shite with a gun. If that day ever comes, you will not step above ground without a balaclava and the cover of night ensuring that your face isn't seen on camera. If you ever see fucking daylight again, it'll be because we've won. Am I making myself quite clear?"

Emma swallowed hard. "Ollie didn't quite phrase it like that. But I thought it might be something along those lines."

"Now." And there was the note, amid stacks of paper on the desk's surface. "I want you to look me in the eye and tell me _exactly_ what you saw, in detail. If you're lying, I'll know. If you're leaving anything out, I'll know. If I think, even for a second, that you're feeding me bullshit, I will _flay your fucking face off and sew it into a new purse._"

Emma told her. She at least had the satisfaction of watching Sam's face drain from the colour of a subterranean mole rat to that of a drowned corpse.

"And you're sure," Sam said when she'd finished.

"Trust me," Emma said. "I'm sure."

"I don't trust you. There are two people in the world whom I trust. One is, according to you, languishing in a secret prison. If he's dead, I'm going to honour his memory by brutally slaughtering a Tory cunt in a ritual blood sacrifice. I think he'd like that, don't you?"

_Oh._ _That_ Sam.

"He's alive," Emma whispered. "Last I saw."

"You'd best hope he stays that way," Sam replied. "We don't get a lot of Tories down here to choose from." Then she leaned forward, elbows on the desk, rubbing at her temples. She couldn't have been any older than Emma, but she suddenly looked ancient, weary. "I'm done with you, for now. Go on outside. Ella will show you around. I'll be gone for a few days."

"So you're—" She shouldn't care, she didn't, except that she _did._ "You'll pass this along to the actual leader, then?"

Sam snorted. "Don't be daft. The actual leader has enough problems."

"You're not going alone? There are guards. It'll be suicide."

"I'm not," Sam confirmed, "going alone." Then, more to herself than to Emma: "I suppose I'm going to church."

* * *

Sam drove all night, stopping only for checkpoints, chewing caffeine tablets, her only company the Wilco cassette tape she'd tugged out of the glove compartment (she'd had to brush dust off the case and she was actually surprised, upon slipping it into the antediluvian player, that it worked at all. Her doubts extended to the car as well.). Sundeep had checked in long enough for an epic row, about the two new refugees in their meeting room, about the collateral damage in an otherwise successful assassination of the Regime's propaganda minister, and oh, mostly about her immediate departure to a fishing village in Scotland, population 94, soon to be reduced to 93 if Sam had her way. It wasn't so much the journey that he objected to—God knew she needed a holiday if it were possible for a lieutenant in a guerrilla army to take a holiday—but the mission, entirely unauthorized by their Glorious Leader, that she intended to undertake afterwards. Without him.

Locked in her maintenance cupboard-cum-office, with only her husband to see, and the soundproofing relatively impressive given its original purpose, Sam had indulged in a quick cry.

Sundeep had immediately shifted gears, pressing her head to the centre of his chest, his thin arms wrapped around her. She'd explained that she wanted him there, more than anything, not just with the black site but with Scotland, too, especially with that, but he _couldn't_ be, not when the risk of failure was so high.

In a rare moment of candidness, she'd confessed to him that being in the same place with the only two people in the world she cared about carried the risk of losing them both at once.

"What about me?" he'd pleaded. "D'you think I'd survive losing _you_?"

She stepped up on her toes to kiss him. "Yes," she'd whispered. "You'd fucking well better."

She pulled into the driveway behind the church just as the service was getting out. Pretty place, this, especially dusted with snow, all mossy stone and peeling paint, fog drifting off the sea to meet the heavy grey clouds. You'd never suspect a place like this had changed much in the centuries its buildings had stood, never imagine it coming under the thumb of the Regime. As she climbed out of the car, she drew the attention of more than a few people coming out of the church, but they greeted her with smiles more open than any she'd seen in London, and it tore at her heart. She silently apologized to them for the hell she was about to rain down on their tranquil lives, for depriving them of their parish priest, for being a reminder that the world beyond their village was vicious and remorseless and closing in on them.

He didn't come out, so she went in. She hadn't set foot in a church, Catholic or otherwise, for years. She was surprised to find the priest—one Father Alastair Carmichael, at least officially—sitting in the front pew, facing the altar, his head bowed as if in prayer, which for all it defied belief might actually be the case.

"I saw your car pull up outside," he said by way of explanation, and she was startled to discover that he had a volume setting below a dull roar. "Let's no' do this here. Walk and talk."

He led her out to the seaside, a remote stretch past the docks, though contrary to his suggestion, he didn't speak until she did. "You look good," Sam offered, and it was startlingly true. She hoped he hadn't found some sort of inner peace out here that she was about to shatter. She'd never thought the country life would have suited him as well as it did, but he lacked the pallor of everyone she knew in London, and despite a curling beard that lent him at least enough gravitas to pass for a priest, he looked much more relaxed and youthful than she might have expected.

And the cassock, well, she'd file that one away for later.

"Trouble down south, then?"

She handed him the note, now quite worn, nevertheless enough to make her heart leap into her throat every time she looked at it. And—she would have been tempted to think _thank God,_ except—she was treated promptly to an outpouring of colourful obscenity, much of it uncomfortably blasphemous under the circumstances, characteristic not so much of Father Alastair Carmichael but of the Pitbull of Downing Street himself, Jamie Macdonald.

As she had, he asked if she was sure, only with more "fucks" thrown in.

Sam shook her head. "The girl's scared, but I don't think she was lying. It's the most likely lead we've had."

"You've told the Glorious Leader?"

"If I had," Sam said, "do you think I'd be here? Just the two of us. I'm not going to risk another cock-up like three years ago, not on this bint's word alone. I'd go myself but I thought you'd want to know."

"Jesus," the priest muttered. "Jesus fuckity Christ."

"So you're in."

He looked out at the sea, the late morning light, diffused by fog, illuminating every windblown crevice in his face. His cassock flapped behind him. She realized that she'd been waiting for Jamie's fury to bubble over, for him to shout or smash something to pieces, but he only stared ahead as though seeking an answer from the ice-crusted water. Sam, naturally, knew as well as anyone what had knocked the fight out of him, and no one could have blamed him for leaving when he did. If fishing boats and the Virgin Mary gave him some comfort after everything he'd been through, she could hardly begrudge him that. But she wanted divine fucking wrath, and she hoped to hell that the hollow shell masquerading as a human being had it in him.

She'd never seen him stay still for so long.

"I like it here," he said finally, "Can you believe that, Sam, because I cannae. Some days I catch myself goin' on like none of it happened, like I really am—" He stopped, and the corners of his lips turned up in a crude mockery of a grin. "No surrender, aye?"

"Jamie."

"Of course I'll come with ye. It isnae though there's a fuckin' choice in the matter." She felt him clasp her hand. It wasn't a romantic gesture. She'd never so much as touched him before, not even at the memorial service, and she was startled at how rough his hands were, like he'd been out at sea too. Had they always been like that, back when he was ostensibly just a bureaucrat? "Come on, then. I've a present for ye."

They walked back to the church. The wind had picked up, and she hunched her body against it, grateful when he pushed the heavy oak door shut behind her. He led her into the sacristy—"I'm Protestant, is this even allowed?"—and tugged aside an old rug to reveal a loose floorboard.

Now it was her turn to swear, copiously, and with a ferocity that would have made her mentor proud. Beneath the church floors was a small armoury, assault rifles, ammunition boxes, bomb components, even what she thought was a rocket launcher. "Where did it all come from?"

Jamie shrugged. "Sympathetic friends on the outside. Arms smuggled in, people smuggled out, and every so often one o' the fuckin' cunts gets topped. No' as well as your lot do, but respectable, yeah?"

"Yeah," she breathed. Her own cell would kill to have this kind of firepower casually at their disposal. "The local authorities?"

"Haven't come for the Catholics yet." He tugged the first gun loose and threw it in her direction, as though he had no doubt that she'd easily catch it. Which she did. Neither of them had adapted well to a retreat from public life, and she suspected him of spending as much time as she did drilling with illegally smuggled guns. He retrieved several duffel bags, and she realized he'd been planning something like this for a while. "Well, Meinhof," he said. "Shall we pay a visit to the Regime?"

* * *

Meanwhile.

Ross Lowell, newly appointed Minister of Propaganda—his predecessor having recently met his demise courtesy of terrorists kind enough to ensure a constant stream of fresh ideas moving through the department—blinked nervously and hoped, rather in vain, that no one could see it. The cell was dark, but its occupant, currently sprawled over a filthy mattress shoved in the corner, his outline barely visible against the presumably-once-white rectangle, had been in the dark for a long time. If he could see at all, his eyes must have adjusted to the conditions. Lowell hadn't gotten a good look at him when the cell door had opened, and he could see even less now. He had a mental image drawn from three-year-old tabloids but he suspected it wasn't all that accurate anymore.

"You don't want me in with you?" the guard had asked.

"He's hardly dangerous now," Lowell had answered, though he privately felt that if that were actually the case, they'd have executed the prisoner instead of tossing him into the first—but not the last—black site to be built on British soil. Now he found himself pressed against the door, the lock digging into his lower back, and nowhere to crouch or sit without ruining his trousers.

"Hello, Malcolm," he said, in the faux-cheery voice he reserved for his occasional media appearances. He'd have to use it more, now that he'd become the official velvet glove for the Regime's iron fist.

If Malcolm heard, he gave no indication. The mass of shadows in the corner didn't so much as stir. Undeterred, Lowell gave his name, then, "Do you know who I am?"

That was apparently too much of a temptation, because a gray, terrible voice, growled: "I don't fucking know you. You're no one, ye don't fuckin' exist. Fuck off."

"I thought we might be friends."

Lowell could see a little better now, a gaunt spectre of a man, whittled into sharp angles by a privation that had begun long before the coup. He'd been foolish for even considering the guard's offer. Malcolm didn't look like he was able to stand, let alone attack him.

"We're in the same line of work. Or, we were."

Malcolm muttered something that might have been another "fuck off" and might have just been rambling to himself. There was no force behind the sentiment; he was slumped over the mattress, his arms wrapped around his knees and his breath wheezing with the effort of even this half-attempt at speech. Lowell, seizing the opportunity of an audience more captive than even the one he usually had, continued.

"You're of no real use to the Regime. You lasted under interrogation, what was it? Eight minutes? After which you were willing to tell them everything you knew, none of which was in any way useful. Even before we took over, you had no power. Did you think it would have been different, if you'd been free at the time? You're alive because you were already locked up and weren't worth a bullet. No one even knows you're here."

He paused, trying to suss out whether he'd been understood.

"Let me make this clear," he said. "We are winning. We will continue to win. I've been appointed to ensure that the state of affairs that has restored Britain to greatness continues unopposed and unabated. But in order to do so, I find myself in the difficult position of circumventing a certain deficit of creativity amongst our leadership. A position with which I understand you, in your day, were quite familiar."

Lowell moved from the door to stand at the end of the mattress. He knelt to be at eye-level with the shaggy grey head.

"I thought I might ask your advice."

The prisoner's head sagged to his bony knees, and his thin shoulders trembled. Lowell was sure that the ragged, broken noises that wracked his body were sobbing until Malcolm looked up, his pale eyes blasted and vacant but entirely dry, and Lowell took a step backward and almost tripped on his arse.

Malcolm wasn't crying. He was _laughing._

Lowell called for the guards.


	3. Some Tin-Pot Story

_[A/N: Copious thanks to ThornWild and stackcats for Brit-picking and proofreading. I am awed by the kindness of strangers.]_

Jamie babbled non-stop as Sam drove, and to her relief, it was nearly all about plans. He was clutching a set of blueprints that she'd hastily retrieved from the archives just before her mad flight north, mapping out the entrances and exits to the auto plant-turned-secret-prison, babbling on about explosives and diversionary tactics with the rapid-fire diction of a general and the linguistic flair of a Glaswegian sewer rat.

She wondered if it wouldn't have been better to go to the leadership rather than going off half-cocked with only Jamie as back-up. They could have launched a proper raid. With half of Jamie's armoury stuffed in the hollowed-out compartment under the backseat, they'd all have stood a chance. She must have voiced at least some of these thoughts out loud—God, she was _tired_—because he immediately snapped at her to _stop those fuckin' thoughts, sweetheart, right now, y'hear?_ _Remember Leyhill?_

Sam did. Her disastrous first run at terrorism. The fate of prisoners, so-called-political or otherwise, had been one of the earliest signs of the Regime's trajectory. All sentences were extended indefinitely, pending review; Category D prisons were to be closed and their prisoners transferred to an undisclosed location. Sam had duly consulted the leadership—haphazardly organised back then—and they'd _deliberated,_ and by the time her squad had bashed open the doors, the facility was devoid of anyone beyond a small but well-equipped group of soldiers who'd stayed behind to ambush them.

The Regime had never publicly stated what it had done with the prisoners, and meanwhile, Sam had the blood of a dozen actual comrades on her hands, with nothing left but speculation as to _why_ she'd been so eager to raid that prison in particular. Only an unbroken streak of successful operations, accompanied by the mitigating factor of _painful personal history,_ redeemed her reputation in the eyes of the Resistance's inner circle.

This time would have to be quiet. If they failed, the Resistance would lose one highly regarded lieutenant and one mildly unhinged arms smuggler. If they succeeded, she could make her apologies later.

"Checkpoint," Jamie said, interrupting her thoughts. She slowed to give him enough time to stuff the blueprints under the seat. They were driving a ruined stretch of the A74, the earth pockmarked and trees smashed, the only sign of life a barricade of flashing lights and unmarked vans and a line of cars in front of them.

"My ID's in the glove compartment." She'd let her hair down for the drive; catching a glimpse of herself in the side mirror, she thought she almost looked the part of the coltish office worker, a complete non-entity. There were lines on her face that hadn't been there three years ago, but everyone was thinner and harder these days, with the rationing.

The soldiers motioned the car in front of them off to the side of the road. Its occupant, a well-dressed middle-aged man, stood beside the front tyre as they searched the vehicle. He looked about ready to cry.

Sam forced a bright smile and handed over her card. Jamie did the same; with the priest's collar above his fisherman's sweater and those perpetually adolescent wide eyes of his, she suspected he was much more convincingly innocent than she was. Still, Sam didn't breathe until the scanner's LED blinked green and they waved her past.

"Only four hundred fuckin' more to go," he muttered, which was as far as he'd concede to being scared shitless. His knee bobbed under the glove compartment. It was clear enough that he wanted something to hit, and soon.

An hour from Dagenham, they took refuge for the remainder of the cold afternoon in the stopped car off the side of the road. Sam knew that she should at least attempt sleep, but her pulse was racing and Jamie was still worrying over maps and blueprints long after the point of usefulness.

"I can't believe you're a priest," she said.

"I cannae believe yer fuckin' _married._"

Conscious of the minefield that surrounded _that_ particular discussion, she replied, "You can believe I'm a terrorist, though."

He said, "Aye," with such cold precision that she was reminded that he'd been capable of bloody mayhem well before there'd been good cause to deal it out.

They were so close. After three years, he'd been in London all this time, and she pushed down the sick giddiness in her stomach. She hadn't given up, that was the important thing. She hadn't forgotten.

She must have drifted off eventually, because the next thing she knew Jamie was roughly shaking her awake. It was dark, silver moonlight spilling through the car windows the way the searchlights did, and her instinct to panic was stilled immediately by Jamie's hand over her mouth. They knew their roles. They changed in the cramped seats without the slightest acknowledgment of embarrassment—years of living close-quarters with the Resistance had trained her to ignore bodies, even attractive ones—into black cargo pants and balaclavas, slung rifles over their shoulders and stuffed grenades into their pockets. She kept silent over the last expanse of road into bleak industrial decay.

The plant finally in sight, they parked and stood some distance away. Sam felt him take her hand again. She squeezed his in response, once, and met his eyes. He lit a cigarette, shoved through the mouth hole of his balaclava, a condemned man's last puff before the firing squad.

"Let's bury the fuckers," she said.

* * *

The last time the soldiers came for Malcolm, it wasn't an interrogation.

They didn't ask questions, didn't even try to persuade him, as Lowell had, to politely arselick his way to a slightly less rancid cell by offering his sage advice to the Regime's apparatchiks. There was nothing they wanted from him beyond watching him thrash against the restraints, pointless, stupid reprisal for the Resistance's latest attack, and his only consolation was that they were settling for torturing him because all of the actual killers had gotten away.

It wasn't much of a consolation, though, not with the cold water filling his nostrils and mouth, the suffocating, clawing agony in his chest, and who'd have thought that drowning would feel so much like being set ablaze from the inside? The wet cloth over his eyes prevented him from so much as seeing his tormenters, and he choked and gagged and tried to scream but the noise that came out instead was a death rattle, the sound of his already-bollocked lungs deciding that was fucking it, they were done with him for good this time. When there was a pause for him to catch his breath, the breath didn't come. Instead he sobbed, and tried to retch, and of course this was how he'd die, eyes bulging out of his skull, the air throttled out of him, every thought and word burned from his throat, stripped of authority and dignity and horribly, wretchedly alone.

His body had seldom been more than an inconvenience for him, a skinny sack of bones and not much meat that he dragged behind him like a lodestone, but he nonetheless raged at its betrayal, its weakness. He was dying, and the distant shouting down the hall, the pop of gunfire, barely registered: the last fantasies of an oxygen-deprived brain, still dreaming of rescue when the rest of him had given up. Even the crash of a door being kicked open wasn't happening, or if it was, it was happening somewhere far away from him.

After a lifetime in politics, he didn't believe in miracles.

Someone shouted a stream of invective that contained his name. More gunshots, somewhere above the surface, a minor disturbance compared to the roaring current in his ears.

And then he was being released from his restraints, propped up into a sitting position with a puffer in his mouth. "Breathe!" And he was truly dead, or irreparably deranged, because it sounded exactly like _Sam_. He somehow found a last flicker of strength to inhale, and it hurt like hell but his respiratory passages opened enough to admit air, and the person who in no possible way could be Sam put her arms around him and murmured, "Oh, Malcolm."

It was the first time in over four years that anyone had held him. He collapsed against her, into blessed darkness.

* * *

The guards had been prepared for them, the trap set for the Resistance as much as it was meant to confirm that Emma Messinger was leaking more dirt than a punctured colostomy bag, but they weren't (Sam would note, in hindsight, with some degree of pride in her ability to plan on the fly) expecting anything like Jamie. The operations the Regime had weathered lately were scattered, cautious affairs—a homemade nail bomb here, a quick snatching there—nothing like a giant fuck-off blast from the RPG that tore a hole through one of the walls, or a flurry of grenades lobbed at the soldiers who immediately rushed to investigate. Between the two of them, they were too fast, too heavily armed, and too reckless with their own lives to keep out.

She went into something like a trance at times like these, firing at anything that moved, her trigger finger moving of its own accord as though she'd been doing this all her life. She was, she had to admit, every bit as good at killing people as she'd been at fixing copiers and remembering who took what in their coffee.

There were no numbers on the cell doors, but Emma had described it, third door from the end of the corridor, with a long scrape below the lock. It was actually open. She'd thought to shoot it off, or torture one of the guards into giving up the code, but everything was actually easier than she'd gone in expecting until she kicked open the door and it suddenly got much, much harder.

She heard, as if from the other end of a tunnel, Jamie yelling for Malcolm, and then just shouting.

Sam had to force herself to look, because otherwise all three of them were dead, first at the two soldiers, dressed in the grey uniform of the Regime, then down at the body cuffed to a table, head thrown back with a dripping cloth draped over the face, a whistle of breath emitting from it that sounded like air sucked through a crushed straw. Without thinking, she raised her gun and shot the man standing closest to her through the forehead, then backed away as Jamie shoved himself past her and through the door.

It was as if she, too, couldn't breathe. Jamie glanced at Malcolm, who _fucking hell_ wasn't moving at all, and launched himself at the other soldier. The man, quite capable of torturing a restrained and emaciated man in his fifties, proved to be substantially less capable of handling an enraged, if diminutive, former rugby back, and while Sam fumbled at the corpse's belt for the keys to the cuffs, she watched Jamie in a full-on rabid frenzy out of the corner of her eye.

Apparently, it was possible to bash someone's skull against the side of a table until it exploded like an overripe watermelon. Good to know.

Sam lifted Malcolm up into a sitting position and forced the inhaler into his mouth, commanded him to breathe, to be alive, and was rewarded for her faith with a shuddering heave so violent she was afraid it would tear him apart. There was barely anything left of him under the ragged shroud of uniform. She looked over his shoulder to see Jamie still slamming the soldier's head into the table.

"We need to go," she said, "We need to get him out of here."

Jamie swore again, but he dropped the soldier and staggered over to where Sam clutched Malcolm to her.

"Malc," he whispered in a broken voice. "Can ye walk?"

"I don't think he can hear you."

Jamie, caveman that he was, slung the unconscious body over his shoulder, fireman style, pistol in hand, and it was a measure of his determination to get all of them out of there _now_ that Sam had to struggle to keep up with him. More guards were flooding out from the cells, and she fired over and over again, willed herself to stay moving, stay shooting, until they were away and she could finally break down.

They reached the car. Jamie, almost tenderly for someone liberally splattered with another man's blood and brains, lay Malcolm across the back seat and climbed in next to him, and didn't have to tell Sam to drive like hell.

* * *

Berserker rage still boiling through him, Jamie shut his eyes tightly and tried desperately to calm the fuck down, just for a moment, before he punched a hole through the car door. Malcolm was out cold, a mercy that Jamie could almost envision as an act of a loving God who wasn't out to fuck them all. His breath came in pained wheezes, but he _was _breathing, and Jamie craned his neck up at Sam and said, "Why d'ye have a puffer anyway?" Whereupon she tearfully confessed that she'd always carried a spare because Malcolm had a tendency to lose his, and she'd carefully transferred it to each new purse, long after he'd been arrested.

He turned his attention back to Malcolm, and what he saw almost made him suggest to Sam that they turn back so that he could ram several live grenades into the rectums of anything there possessed of both a grey uniform and a pulse. Malcolm was sheet-white, desiccated skin clinging to too-prominent bone, what little colour he'd had before so completely sapped that he looked like he'd been run several times through a bad copier. Jamie was obsessing over the long hair and beard that made him look about twenty years older when he saw the hand dangling over the edge of the seat, fingers bent and crooked in a way that suggested they wouldn't have closed properly if he'd tried to make a fist, and obviously intended to ensure that he never picked up a pen again. Heat flooded to Jamie's eyes and he was sure he was going to be sick.

"He needs a hospital," Jamie said, as if such things were possible in their utter clusterfuck of a world.

"We can't," Sam replied, "and you know we can't."

Jamie pushed back a wail of frustration and as softly as he could manage, placed his palm over Malcolm's bumpy ribcage. Stroked there, trying both to soothe him and assess the extent of his injuries, but Malcolm groaned and Jamie pulled his hand back as if stung. He settled for rubbing his thumb over Malcolm's temple, which was tolerated, barely; the man was a prickly auld cunt even while unconscious.

The agreed-upon plan, which had failed to take into account just how badly the fuckers had worked Malcolm over, was to switch cars outside of London and then take him to a safe house, which Sam now amended to, "No, Julius's place," and Jamie found himself nodding along, because as much as he detested the shiny poncy bawbag, Julius would let them in. Julius would have food that wasn't tasteless rations, and running water, and a fuck-off gigantic feather bed, and Malcolm needed all of those things more than any of them needed safety. Jamie would personally rip out the throat of anyone who came near Malcolm anyway. Which he was quite capable of doing.

Malcolm stirred, and for a few minutes his red-rimmed, sea-foam eyes seemed to focus entirely on Jamie, and Jamie found himself for the first time in his life completely at a loss for words. He wanted nothing more than to pick the man up and cling to him, the absolute last thing he had in the entire world, and mumble all manner of sentimental jessie bollocks that he'd never actually admit, even to himself, except that it had been such a long fucking night and Malcolm looked for all the world like he was dying.

"You daft fucking twat," he said instead. "You're supposed tae be doin' the waterboarding, no' the other way 'round."

Malcolm just stared at him, his expression unreadable, and Jamie pressed their foreheads together and shut his eyes to keep the tears in.

"Puir auld fuck," he whispered. He could feel Malcolm slump back down on the seat, but Jamie couldn't make himself break contact, sure that if he pulled away Malcolm would evaporate into the ghost he'd been since the Regime's bloody rise to power. Though folded into what could charitably be described as a stress position in the gap behind the front seat, Jamie didn't move until they reached a car lot and Sam was opening the door and ordering him—_the ex-PA, ordering him around_ —to move Malcolm into the back of a van.

God, he weighed nothing. Jamie settled him in the seat with his head cradled in his lap and circled his hand around a wrist as thick as two of his fingers, and quietly promised to visit truly creative and sadistic violence upon the cuntswallops who had done this to him.

They reached Julius' just before dawn, Sam driving along back roads to avoid checkpoints—one thing to skirt by patrols with a disarming smile and several duffle bags stuffed with weapons, and another entirely to smuggle an unconscious Enemy of the State past the Regime's blood-brain barrier. He let her do the explaining and pushed past the stuttering ponce in his monogrammed dressing gown to carry Malcolm upstairs. He debated between the bathroom and the bedroom before Malcolm made the decision for him, scrabbling out of his arms to run for the toilet and curling over the rim in barely enough time for the bowl to catch a splatter of sick.

Jamie dropped beside him and rubbed between his shoulder blades, cringing at the knobby ridge of spine visible even beneath the rough fabric of his shirt. Malcolm allowed it for a few seconds before snarling at him, flushing the toilet, and slamming himself against the edge of the tub in an apparent effort to get as far from Jamie as possible. Jamie, stupidly, reached for him, only to have his hand slapped away.

"Piss off!"

His voice was so strained that Jamie's immediate reaction was to lean in closer, except that this was the wrong thing to do because Malcolm flinched into the small crevice between the toilet and the bathtub, hugging his knees to his chest and glaring hatefully at Jamie.

"Malc…"

"Fuck. Off. Get out."

It occurred to him that they'd tortured Malcolm into insanity, that it was possible that he didn't know where he was or who he was with, that he was probably completely terrified, and it also occurred to him that there'd be no way to tell the difference, really, and so he backed away, slowly, hopelessly fantasizing that Malcolm would just act like a normal person for once and let Jamie take care of him, cursing profusely when he didn't. When he closed the door behind him, Sam was there, looking every bit as tired as Jamie felt, and Julius was watching them all from the stair.

From behind the closed bathroom door, the sound of water running and something that might have been a fist slamming into porcelain, again and again.

"I'm going back in there," Jamie said, and Sam clutched his arms.

"Julius, can you, I don't know, can you fuck off for a second? Make tea or something?" There was no venom in her words, just pure desolation. She wrapped her arms around Jamie and buried her face against his neck.

"He's in pain," Jamie whimpered. "You'd think he'd let me, at least—"

She reached for his hand and threaded her fingers through his. The sounds from the other side of the door were muffled, but not nearly muffled enough.

"Do you actually think he'd want either of us to see him like that?"

"I dinnae care," Jamie said. "I just want—" Not that he could complete that sentence, not that he needed to with her, Sam being the only person who loved Malcolm as much as he did.

"There's about a hundred bathrooms in this place," Sam said. "Get yourself cleaned up. We both smell like shit. He'll be fine."

"He won't be!" Jamie whined.

"No, I guess not," she said. But he was listening to her nonetheless, moving stiff limbs in the direction of a second bathroom, aware of every ache and strain in his body. He was getting old, as much as his looks disguised it, and it had been years since he'd been in a proper fight. The shower's water sluiced over him and dripped pink into the drain. He realised belatedly that he'd split his knuckles open at some point in the evening's activities, and came up just short of deciding that listening to Sam hadn't been an entirely shite idea.

When he emerged, a hundred years later, Julius and Sam were easing Malcolm—badly shaved and dressed in a silk nightshirt that might have made for excellent blackmail material a lifetime ago—into Julius's ridiculous bed, shaking him awake enough to swallow Paracetamol that must have cost a small fortune on the black market and for which Jamie would have gladly sucked the baldy twat's cock if it meant that Malcolm got a few hours of pain-free sleep. He looked more like himself, without the beard and with his hair damp and flattened against his skull. They'd have to cut the rest of the tangles off in the morning, Jamie decided, that hair made him look like the fucking Cryptkeeper, if any of them lived that long. Or maybe it was already the morning. He moaned.

"Why don't you stay with him for a bit," Sam suggested, with a clear implication of _the adults are talking downstairs, Jamie,_ and it was a measure of just how pathetic Jamie was that he nodded eagerly, dragged the armchair over from the corner to sit close to the bed. If no one, Malcolm especially, was going to let Jamie climb in beside him and hold him (despite the fact that he hadn't seen the man in four years and three of those had been spent in a dank pisshole being tortured) the least Jamie could do was guard him while he slept.

Experimentally, Jamie traced a finger over his maimed hand, so lightly that he was sure Malcolm wouldn't have felt it even if he'd been conscious. The injury looked old, the bones shattered and never properly set, and Jamie's eyes darted around the bedroom in search of something that he could smash in retaliation. Patience had never been his strong suit, and he was no one's first choice for a caregiver, being more adept at dealing out pain than at mitigating it, and more than anything else he wanted Malcolm to wake up and _be_ Malcolm again, derisive and arrogant and scowling and in possession of a cunning plan to drown every one of the Regime's cut-rate jackbooted cat rapists in an ocean of horse piss. And to not be broken. Four years ago, before the inquiry and the trial and the war and the Regime, Jamie would have sworn that nothing in this world or the next could have broken Malcolm, but four years was a millennium in politics and the tangible evidence lay crumpled in front of him.

Malcolm, or whatever was left of him, curled on his side and wheezing shallow breaths into Julius's pillow, didn't do Jamie the favour of so much as stirring, and suddenly Jamie didn't want to think about drowning anyone.

Fuck it—he just needed to talk to the bastard. Jamie didn't have friends, neither of them did. They were too angry and driven and heartless. In the years before the coup, with Nicola blunderfucking the Party into irrelevance and Jamie in Siberian-gulag exile, their pint nights had devolved into vitriolic e-mails and too much careful distance. He'd come to the trial on the first day and Malcolm had shouted him out with a vehemence Jamie wished he'd reserved for his inquisitors.

After, though, it had been different. He'd needed Malcolm, and Malcolm was in prison, and then Malcolm was just _gone,_ and Jamie was left with merely God to confide in. Which honestly wasn't an adequate substitute. Going on twenty years, and no shortage of petty betrayals, vicious fights, losses and disappointments between them, and he still couldn't imagine a world in which Malcolm fucking Tucker was not the centre of his universe.

He knew, if he were honest with himself—and despite years of enforced religious contemplation, his bouts of genuine self-reflection were rare—he should have returned to the game years ago. He was no better than Julius, holed up in his palace and deluding himself that he was _making a fucking difference_ while the country crumbled to shit around him.

Priesthood or no, Jamie never prayed. Hadn't in years, not since that night, shortly after the coup, when Sam had appeared on his doorstep, whispering, "Jamie, Jamie, I'm so sorry," and he'd understood at long last what God had in store for him. Even now, he didn't so much pray as bargained. God owed him one. Four, but he'd take one, if Malcolm would just be okay, if Jamie could live long enough to fistfuck their enemies into submission. He would be the divine fucking sword of retribution, driven with righteous fury up the arses of the wicked until they choked on their own shit and blood, if only.

If only. Fuck. He leaned back in Julius's stupid brocaded armchair, and waited.

* * *

Julius had biscuits, and they were _contraband_ biscuits, and if Sam weren't a happily married woman and Julius no doubt a confirmed bachelor, she might have kissed him. She lifted the first one reverently, held it between two fingers and contemplated it with an intense focus born of fatigue as much as hunger, before taking the smallest bite possible and letting it dissolve to mush on her tongue.

Nothing she'd eaten in her entire life had ever tasted so good, and nothing would ever taste so good again.

Julius, ever polite even if he could never possibly understand starvation, sat quietly until she'd finished the first biscuit and was reaching, with somewhat less urgency, for a second, before gesturing for her to speak. "I'm sorry," she managed. "I can't even say I didn't have anywhere else to go. And I might have been followed."

Julius nodded, made a "hmm" noise, and sipped at his cup of tea. She did likewise, the liquid stinging her cracked lips.

"I might have fucked up," Sam added.

"I am not entirely without defences, my dear," Julius said, and he cast an eye at the suit of armour, no doubt belonging to one of his illustrious ancestors, mounted in the corner. She had a sudden vision of him donning it and riding forth to battle with the Regime's thugs, and she quickly coughed and covered her mouth. He must have realised, because he said, "I didn't mean—only that I've a _title._ Britain may have fallen to the fascists, but it is still Britain."

Had she had any tears left to spend, she might have wept at the thought, but she was rung out like a sodden dishtowel. Britain was still Britain, and Julius was still Julius, with his gentle voice and his biscuits (where the fuck was he getting them? Was the Regime hoarding Jammy Dodgers in some Cold War-era bunker?) and in his opulent dining room with its oil portraits and tapestries, she could pretend that nothing outside had changed. She didn't even _like_ Julius, but the familiar was as priceless as what little good remained in the world.

"I am glad to see you, Samantha. Would you believe that I was worried?"

"You? I might actually, yeah." She twisted a piece of her hair—greasy; she should have followed her own advice and taken a shower—around her finger.

"Much as it would be delightful to believe that you've come to reminisce over tea and biscuits about our lamented shared past, I imagine you have other pressing concerns."

This was it, then. "Can you get someone to France, Julius?"

He was quiet for a time, sipping tea, with the selfsame expression she'd seen on his face just before he would stride into Malcolm's office with a particularly asinine idea. "Someone?" he said, "I can, and have. It isn't easy, as you know, but officials can be bribed. Malcolm Tucker, however? If his face hadn't already been indelibly printed in the minds of every one of the Regime's enforcers, it certainly will be once they've discovered that they've misplaced him."

"Not to mention the bodies." She sighed. "That's what I thought."

"And young James?"

"Well, I can hardly mention France to Jamie, not after—" Had Julius even heard about that? She imagined not, given that he wasn't trying to drown Jamie in tea and misdirected sympathy. "Besides, you'd need a crowbar to pry him away from Malcolm."

"Have you considered the radical notion of asking Malcolm what he wants?"

"He's said about three words since we pulled him out of there. You can probably guess what they were. I don't think he's—" She couldn't say it, not without the concern that speaking her fears aloud would somehow give them tangible shape. "That is to say, we didn't rescue him because he's useful to the cause."

Julius reached out and patted her hand, and she wouldn't cry, not in front of him, and certainly not with Malcolm upstairs. "My dear, dear girl," and she wished his voice wasn't so horribly kind. "I am well aware of that."

"He'd have planned it out," Sam said. "He'd have known what to do." And worse, the _Regime_ had a plan. They always did, and they weren't swayed by emotion or nostalgia or compassion. "I'm afraid I've put you in terrible danger."

"You have," Julius agreed. "But I made my peace some time ago. There are far worse causes for which to die."

"You're not a revolutionary, Julius."

"No more than you. And yet here we are, two dissidents sheltering a fugitive and waiting for the Regime to kick down the door. You may stay as long as you need, until then."

"I can't." Sam drained the last of her tea, eying the teapot instead of meeting his gaze. "I'll have to explain myself. There's no sense in delaying it. I'd only hoped…" Even as the words left her mouth, she understood the hollowness of them. Knew that while the loyal, adoring girl she'd been might have wanted to protect Malcolm and get him as far away from London as possible, the pragmatic soldier she'd become had to believe he had some strategic value to them. She'd allowed for the possibility that he was too far gone to be of any use—Emma had said as much—but she'd always known, at some level, that broken or not he'd be coming back with her.

"You should get some sleep," Julius said. "I have a feeling that it will be some time before you have the opportunity again. I'll show you to the guest bedroom."

"I've probably gotten you killed, and now I've put you on the couch, too?"

"Sacrifices must be made," Julius said stoically, and patted her hand once more.

Julius' guest bedroom was larger than the flat she'd lived in before the coup, and she collapsed gratefully onto the bed, the first she'd slept in for ages. She wasn't even aware of drifting off, and might have slept more than a few hours if Jamie hadn't screamed.


	4. Ghost Town

_[A/N: Another massive thanks to ThornWild and stackcats for Brit-picking, proofing, and encouraging my ongoing madness.]_

Lowell, unlike his counterparts in the Resistance, was not one for secret meetings in either cafés or irradiated tube stations. He sent a car directly to Ollie's office and had him driven to his own residence in Notting Hill, where he received him warmly with a bottle of 2009 Chateau Lafite Rothschild that told Ollie everything he needed to know about exactly how fucked he was.

"Please," Lowell said with an expansive sweep of his arm. "Have a seat."

Ollie perched on the edge of an immaculate white sofa and swirled the wine in his glass. "Isn't this illegal?"

"What thing worth having is not? To the spoils of power!" He reached across the space between them to clink Ollie's glass, and drank first, as if to assure Ollie that he wasn't being poisoned.

Bribed, on the other hand. "What do you want, Ross?"

"Indulge me." He retrieved his mobile, fiddling with the projector app until it shone a wide rectangle of light on the white blank wall. The light coalesced into what appeared to be security footage of the inside of a prison cell. The camera was obviously sophisticated; the video wasn't the grainy and silent black-and-white of the police procedurals that Ollie remembered from his youth, but vivid, sharp colour and sound that left no ambiguity about what he was watching.

On the projection, two soldiers moved around a third figure, shrouded and cuffed to a table, and Ollie studied his wine. "I'd rather not," he said.

"I insist," Lowell replied. "Keep watching."

The man on the table choked and spluttered, straining against his bonds. "Is this a snuff film? Because I'm not into—" Which was when the video shook with the roar of an explosion, followed by the door swinging open and two tiny balaclava-clad intruders wrecking merry havoc across the screen.

Lowell paused it, with a view of the caved-in head of one of the soldiers in the foreground. "Well?" he prompted.

"It _is_ a snuff film."

"I presume you recognise its subjects."

He peered at the frozen image. "That's Malcolm, isn't it?"

Lowell nodded. He pointed at one of the terrorists with his mobile; the image flickered as it adjusted itself to the movement. "That, we know, is Samantha Cassidy. Charming, elusive, very deadly, and with an inexplicable grudge against my department."

He was a good enough actor to feign surprise. "_Sam?_ She brought the coffee, for fuck's sake."

"It's safe to say she's doing more than that now. Who's the other one?"

Ollie squinted, deadpanned, "You mean the one in the mask?"

Lowell rewound. In reverse, the soldier's head knit itself back together, his attacker released him from his grip.

"The dead man is Private Ian Winslow, age 24. I'm told he left a wife and two young boys. You can imagine, Oliver, how important it is to them that we bring his killer to justice."

Unmoved, Ollie said, "What I'd like to know is how two terrorists managed to break into your secret prison. It isn't a very good secret, is it?"

"They had help, of course."

"From you."

Lowell had a shark's smile. "And others. But mostly from me."

"Spoil the ending for me, then. Does the Resistance have Malcolm?"

"As planned. I believe he's at the residence of one Lord Nicholson of Arnage presently, but they'll no doubt have plans to move him closer to their base of operations."

Closer to where the Resistance was hiding Emma, who'd known it was a trap but couldn't stop herself from falling into it. Ollie, who'd always taken a measure of pride in his own detachment, felt the fine wine churn in his stomach. "Clever," he admitted.

"I went to see him recently," Lowell said. "Tucker, that is, not Nicholson. He's a vegetable, but I suppose the Resistance can pretend that he has some sort of symbolic value."

Ollie shook his head. This much, at least, was safe to give the Regime. "Sam's in love with him. Always was. She's married to some rebel bloke now but I don't imagine it's changed her feelings."

Lowell chuckled. "Enough that she'd strike out on her own? When I set up this heroic tableau, I imagined a much larger assault force. More wine?"

Ollie's glass was still mostly full, but Lowell, ever the consummate host, tipped the mouth of the bottle towards it so that he had the choice of accepting or letting it splash all over the white sofa. Ollie didn't give a shit about the sofa but preferred not to have a lap full of wine, and so he drank for the sake of his trousers. "Rumour has it," and it was a careful line, this, one that Lowell no doubt wanted to blur with inebriation, "that the terrorists' leader doesn't exactly care for Malcolm."

"That," Lowell replied, "hardly narrows down our list of suspects." He played the clip again, rewound it again. Exploded skull, whole skull. "So who does? Who's our mystery man? The _rebel bloke_, come to aid his wife in the rescue of her old flame?"

"He's too short," Ollie said, and immediately regretted it. The less he admitted to knowing about the individual members of the Resistance, the better off everyone was. "If Sam's really acting without the leader's permission, he—or she, you don't know it's not a she—might just be a hired gun."

Lowell flicked back and forth between Winslow, alive and moving towards the door, and Winslow, head dashed to pieces against the side of the table.

"_He,_" Lowell said, "is _not_ a professional. Professionals use guns. This." The image on the screen jumped like a bad stop-motion, and Ollie could pretend that it wasn't real, was just some footage from an Eli Roth film. He could. "This is personal." Rewind. Malcolm, drowning in a secret prison cell. "Might I remind you that we did this to a highly valued and entirely compliant asset? What do you think we'll do to you if you don't cooperate?"

"His name is Jamie Macdonald," Ollie blurted. He hadn't been positive, not on the first viewing, but something in the snap from cool efficiency to uncontrolled rage conjured the memory of stale chips on his chair and a maniac barking in his ear. The build was right, and the anger. So much anger. Later, he'd tell himself that he could live with this particular treachery. He'd betrayed better men than Jamie, and endured worse on his conscience. Lowell's face remained impassive; the name didn't register with him. Ollie blinked at him, then shook his head, barked out something that might have resembled a laugh. "They haven't briefed you yet, then? You really have _no idea._"

"Précis it for me."

"Senior press officer at Number 10, back in the day."

"That doesn't sound particularly frightening."

"You weren't there. He was mental, an utter psycho. Made Malcolm look reasonable by comparison. Malcolm kept him around as a kind of attack dog until they had a falling out. I heard he was actually raised by wolves. Not metaphorically, like they'd actually found him wandering the Scottish highlands killing sheep with his teeth and for some reason decided to dress him in a suit and put him to work for the government."

"And then he joined the Resistance."

"For about six months. He had a family, you see. Ex-wife, three little girls. He pulled strings to get them to France, but—" Lowell was leaning forward and the light curved around his face, the gruesome tableau painted across his skin. Ollie decided that Lowell could do his own damn research. "You are so completely fucked."

"_We_," Lowell corrected. "Don't flatter yourself by pretending that you're cleverly playing both sides. You belong to me."

Ollie shook his head. "You stupid fucking wanker. You had a spitting viper chained up in that cell and you let him go, and now he's going to end you. Malcolm Tucker is the fucking Devil, and Jamie's worse."

"Finish your wine," Lowell said lightly, as if he hadn't just been told that a raging tsunami of fuck was headed in his direction. "I'll have my driver drop you back at your flat. You've done well tonight. I'll have instructions for you in the morning."

* * *

Sam jerked awake and nearly fell over as she stood, her ankle tangled in the bed sheets. Her first instinct was to reach for her pistol; it took her a few seconds to remember where she was, that the gun was actually on top of her neatly folded change of clothes that Julius must have washed while she was sleeping, and she tucked it into the waistband of her grimy black cargo pants before skidding down the hall to where Jamie's cry had come from behind the bathroom door.

She saw the blood first, splattered over both of them and the tiled floor, pooled in the sink, clumping together tufts of long grey hair, the entire bathroom a B-movie horror as Jamie tried to wrestle a straight razor out of Malcolm's hand.

"James? Samantha?" She could hear Julius's footsteps approaching from the staircase; she tried to make sense of the scene before her to stop it right there before he reached them.

"Jamie, what the _fuck_?"

He made another swipe, but Malcolm was armed with a sharp thing, and taller and faster than Jamie was. She couldn't tell whose blood it was. "He just went completely fuckin' _mental_ all of a sudden. Because that's what we need, Malc? You bein' fuckin' batshit. Fuck!" He feinted to one side, then slammed into Malcolm with the full weight of his body, sending them both spilling across the bathtub and the razor clattering across the floor.

The immediate threat removed, Jamie, his chest heaving, pinned Malcolm against the wall of the shower. "You retarded fuckin' auld twat, I'm gonnae finish what those jackbooted Nazi cunts started, what the _fuck_ is wrong with ye—"

Sam turned to Julius, her face a silent plea. "James," he said, as if that might be enough to interrupt him from the stream of barely comprehensible abuse he was howling in Malcolm's face, as if it even registered. "James, _stop it._ Let him go."

"Jamie, the neighbours will hear."

"Fuck the fuckin' neighbours!" Jamie spat, but glancing at the razor—Julius quickly scooped it up from the ground—he loosened his grip on Malcolm's wrists. Without twelve stone of furious Scottish midget holding him in place, Malcolm dropped, and it was only their proximity that gave Jamie enough time to catch him before he hit the porcelain. "Ye dinnae get tae top yourself, y'cunt," Jamie snarled at Malcolm, then pressed Malcolm's head into his shoulder and held it there, stroked the inexpertly shorn back of his skull, more blood on his hand each time it came away, and wept. Malcolm made a few weak attempts at struggling and then just hung, half-draped over Jamie, arms dangling at his side. Jamie dragged him over the side of the tub and slowly lowered him so that he was sitting, ragdoll limp, on the lid of the toilet. There was so much blood that Sam couldn't see at first where it was coming from, but Jamie unspooled a fistful of toilet paper and wadded it against the back of Malcolm's neck, revealing a deep gash before it welled up with more blood.

"Julius," Sam said, feeling another stab of guilt for drawing him into this ugly little melodrama, but Julius was already digging out supplies from the medicine cabinet.

"He did that to himself?"

Jamie's head shot up from where he knelt at Malcolm's feet. "Of course he fuckin' did, what did ye think I'd—" He rubbed at his forehead, leaving a thick streak of blood behind. "Thought he'd gone in tae piss, or cut off the rest of that fuckin' ugly hair." He'd at least done the latter, Sam noticed; what was left of his hair clung to his scalp in a clumsy approximation of his old hairstyle. He didn't seem to be hurt beyond the profusely bleeding cut, which Julius cleaned and staunched with gauze. Whatever madness had possessed him must have deserted him along with the last of his strength. She let herself exhale.

Sam stepped around the blood to stand over the sink. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror; haggard, face lined and eye sockets bruised purple, but it was better than looking at Malcolm, or at Jamie, hunched on the floor, his fingernails digging into his bloodstained jeans. She turned her attention to the sink and was about to run the tap to clear it when a gleam of metal caught her eye.

She picked up the tiny capsule and held it to the light. "Shit." She squinted to see the tiny copper coil, the microchip under glass. It was a little bigger than a grain of rice. "Look at this." Her voice sounded small in the wake of Jamie's shouting.

Julius blinked. "That was _in_ him? Do you think it's transmitting?"

She searched for something heavy to smash the chip, reached for a cup that held more toothbrushes than a man living alone ought to need. Julius snatched it from her and replaced it on the sink's counter.

"I'm afraid, my dear," he said, "it's much too late for that."

"The fuck are you on about, Lady Arnage?" Jamie hadn't moved from the floor, but he was at least half paying attention.

"They've already tracked us here," Julius said. "Every second that atrocity is transmitting from my house is one more second you have to be as far away from it as possible."

Sam nodded; her head was spinning, but it made so much sense it took a few moments for her to remember that Julius had said "you" and not "we." She placed the chip back on the ledge of the sink. "You're coming with us."

"Don't be absurd," Julius replied. "I am staying precisely where I am. They shan't drive me from my own home."

"Julius, you fuckin' pillock, grab your fuckin' powder brush and pincushions and what have you and get out tae the fuckin' car."

The death glare Julius shot Jamie in retaliation wasn't quite up to Malcolm's calibre, but Sam was reasonably impressed under the circumstances. Jamie seemed unmoved; if anything, he looked _happy._ "I haven't the slightest intention of fleeing, James, but I suggest you do unless you'd fancy the Regime committing four murders here instead of one."

Jamie just grinned. "Go on, then, the both of ye. I'll be right down."

"Does the prospect of my imminent demise delight you that much?" Julius asked.

"I dinnae give two fucks, ye baldy scrote. Piss off, I need tae talk with Malcolm."

Julius put a hand on her arm, and she wanted so badly to argue with him, but Jamie was dangerously close to having another shout and she told herself that she'd have a marginally better chance at convincing Julius once they were out of the blast radius. She let him guide her away, pausing only to tell Jamie, "Five minutes."

Jamie kicked the door closed behind them.

* * *

Jamie waited until he heard the retreating footsteps before climbing—not without some effort, his knees protesting with a creak—to his feet and flinging his arms around Malcolm, who came to life for long enough to shove him off. "You utter cunt," Jamie gasped, still beaming. "Yer a fuckin' lunatic, and if you didnae look like seventeen different types of shite I'd rip yer fuckin' throat out. I thought—"

Malcolm's eyes drilled into him. His voice, when it emerged, was flat and rusted.

"You thought what, Jamie?"

Jamie felt his face freeze in a parody of the grin it had held a second ago. "I thought those limp-dicked mingers had arse-raped your brain into further fuckin' senility," he said, "but I see I was wrong."

"Were you?" Malcolm replied in the same creepy-as-fuck monotone.

"Oi," Jamie slapped the side of his head, gentler than he might have done if he wasn't still half convinced that Malcolm was going to dissolve in front of him. "You are in there, yeah? Because—" he snatched the microchip from the sink and waved it like the talisman it was, "—because this says tae me that you wasnae tryin' so much for decapitation as tae get free. Malc. Talk tae me. Tell me tae go fuck myself, I dinnae care, but tell me it's still _you!_"

Malcolm shook his head and slumped again, and Jamie wanted so badly to touch him but he sat down on the side of the tub instead, his hand close enough that Malcolm could have clutched it if he'd inexplicably decided to act like a reasonable person.

"How long has it been?" Malcolm asked finally. "They—Lowell, the PR cuntface—said three years."

"Three years of the Regime." Jamie hated how fucking _eager_ he sounded, clawing for any conversational scraps Malcolm threw his way. "You were eight months into your term when it started."

"A fuckin' geological epoch, then. The Ice Age has come and fucked off and the fuckin' sentient cockroaches have crawled out of the floorboards tae take over."

Jamie barked a singularly joyless laugh. "That's what this is about? Your fuckin' long-term absence from the political stage?"

The cadaverous face lifted again. "What else is there?" Malcolm whispered.

Jamie was sure there were a number of things, but the hollow-eyed madman before him was enough to make him forget the others.

"The world left me behind," Malcolm said. "'S worse than anything else they could do tae me."

"I know," Jamie replied. He offered his hand. Hesitating for an unbearable second, Malcolm grabbed his wrist and let Jamie pull him to his feet. He broke contact immediately, but he didn't seem to know what to do with his hands; hid, without much success, the mutilated right behind the left, and Jamie vowed to stick with the Resistance as long as it took to track down and skin whoever had done that to him. "We'll hang the lot of the fascist tits from lamp posts by their own bloody fuckin' entrails, okay?"

Malcolm gave him the barest ghost of a smile. "Promises, promises."

It was enough, Jamie decided, for now, and was about to retreat to the bedroom to retrieve the coat he'd dumped there when Malcolm grabbed his arm.

"Jamie?"

"Yeah."

"That beard, it's like a syphilitic prozzie's twat. You look like you should be prancing around the countryside arse-raping sheep. It's a fuckin' disgrace."

Jamie flashed him a dumb, goofy smile, the sort he hadn't managed in years. "Sam likes it," he said, and impulsively decided that he did as well.

"She's too polite to say anything. She's thinkin' worse, though. Ask her."

"I'll be out in the car."

* * *

"I had this recurring dream, when I went away to school," Sam was saying. "About Chelsea, our dog. She died just before I left—old age, just kind of…gave up."

Malcolm leaned his face against the inside of the door and closed his eyes. The van weaved an idiosyncratic path through the suburbs, to avoid checkpoints, Sam had said, and every time he sat up and looked through the tinted windshield, it was the fucking Blitz outside. There were more buildings bombed than standing, skeletal husks of high-rises, their windows gouged out, empty lots like broken teeth between them. The rain pissed down, slicking the road black and welling up in potholes, which, again according to Sam, was a good thing in terms of keeping the soldiers safe and warm inside. If the weather in London wasn't constant shite, she'd claimed, the Resistance wouldn't have lasted two weeks.

He'd been sure there was no part of him left that could be damaged, that he'd been consumed with pain and fear for so long that he was somehow inured to it, the way the constant throb of his badly set bones became so much white noise, the way the ache in his ravaged lungs became less surprising with every breath. Nonetheless, driving past the scooped-out shell of his city—strange, after all these years, to think of it as _his city_—was almost too much, and he considered Jamie's suggestion of hiding with the duffel bags of weapons under the seat. At least then, he could delay seeing the scars that the war had left in its wake.

"In the dream, we'd sold the house, but Chelsea wasn't actually dead. We'd left her behind—didn't mean to, of course, we loved that dog—and she didn't understand. She just waited for us, grieved for us even as she was starving to death, waiting for us to come home. Sometimes I'd come back, but it was too late to save her, and—"

Jamie was bollocks at women-type situations, and Malcolm was only slightly better at pretending to be human. "Julius could have come with us, darlin'," he offered. "Didn't sound much like he wanted to. The git wants to be a fuckin' martyr, ye can't stop him."

"It's not even his fight." Was Sam crying again? Jesus fucktits, he was a fucking physical and emotional wreck, dressed in one of Julius's suits that hung off him like he was a wean dressing up in his da's clothes. Jamie, meanwhile, was in pure sociopath mode, petting the rifle on his lap as though he were ready to lay waste to some Eastern European fuckhole at the earliest provocation, and stuffing biscuits in his mouth like he'd never seen food before. So of course Sam was blubbering over fucking Julius. Malcolm might have mourned, but there was no point; he'd wait until someone delivered him the entire butcher's bill, named everyone he'd ever threatened and blackmailed and otherwise persuaded, everyone he'd known in his former life, lined up against the wall and shot in a fate he'd only avoided through a felony conviction.

He'd gotten it together enough to ask after his family. Jamie'd avoided his eyes in the rearview mirror and said that his sister and niece were out, in America last anyone heard, and his mother had passed. Eighty-three, nothing to do with the Regime, but Malcolm felt a cold vacuum where his heart had probably been, once.

"So," Jamie said, "this is the plan, yeah? We present ourselves before this Glorious Leader, having no doubt raised his fuckin' ire, with the consolation prize that we've no doubt tripled our firepower and laid waste tae one of the Regime's black sites, and all is forgiven."

"Unless someone has a better one. She, by the way." Sam pushed a stray twist of hair behind her ear. "The leader."

Malcolm thought that he should ask; it was the kind of thing that should matter to him, and would have, if he didn't expect to wake up any minute on the cold, damp floor of his cell. "Right. The big mystery. I'm picturing some pus-faced, basement-dwelling adolescent poof in a Guy Fawkes mask but I'm getting a strange sense it's much worse than all that."

"Really?" He could feel the burn of Jamie's stare and slit his eyes open long enough to see him craning around the front seat. "For the longest time, I was sure it was you, Malc."

Sam snorted. "You haven't heard what the Resistance calls itself? Privately, I mean." She paused, chewing the inside of her lip. "The Not So Quiet Bat-People."

"Fuck me," Malcolm said, as if that explained absolutely everything that had gone wrong since they'd clapped cuffs on him and hauled him off to Leyhill. He supposed he should have been pleased; more than anything else, he wanted someone incompetent to shout at, and it appeared he'd be getting his wish after all. "Sorry, Sam, sweetheart, but are ye actually sure ye looked as hard as ye could tae find the most completely fuckin' useless bint possible tae lead your wee revolution? Because there might be some day-old sacks of shite somewhere that ye could put in charge instead."

Jamie snickered at this. Sam, her voice rising in pitch, said, "She's changed a bit."

"Did she learn to walk in a straight line?" He stared out at the city, gouged open and bleeding before them, crisscrossed with barbed wire, the soft purr of drones overhead, and Nicola fucking Murray its last defender of freedom and democracy. "I don't suppose ye could turn around and put me back in that cell?"

"Don't even," Sam said, and Jamie gripped his rifle tighter, and they drove on through London's corpse.

* * *

The first of the Regime's men arrived when the sinking sun lit the low, heavy clouds. Julius wondered if they'd waited out of politeness until the dinner hour had passed. The man was State Security, not military, and while he was, of course, armed, did Julius the courtesy of knocking rather than kicking down the door. He was an officer. It might almost have been flattering.

"Lord Nicholson," the man said, unperturbed by the sight of Julius in his dressing gown, one hand in his pocket and the other holding (with perfect pose; he'd been on the fencing team at Eton) a rapier in the intruder's direction. "So sorry to have disturbed you."

"What can I do for you?" His tone was even, solicitous; the blade didn't waver.

"I won't keep you long. I have reason to believe that you're sheltering a fugitive."

"Have you?" Julius stepped aside, the point still a jab away from opening the officer's throat, offering a view of the inside of his house. "Present some form of documentation and you may search to your heart's content."

The man muttered something into his earpiece, waited for a response, then, "Lord Nicholson, I'm afraid I must insist."

"And I'm afraid that I cannot allow you into my home unless you present me with verifiable evidence that you have a right to be there. For all I know, you might have stolen that uniform; you might be one of the rebels yourself."

The man's face reddened; his hand moved for his sidearm. "All right, enough of this. Drop the weapon. Last warning."

Julius regarded him: one of the Regime's many savage young things, stuffed into a tailored uniform and given rank, one musical interlude away from bursting into a chorus of "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." From somewhere nearby, Julius could hear the distant rumbling of an army personnel carrier.

"It is a great tragedy of our age," Julius said, "that it is no longer possible to live as a gentleman, and some small consolation that it is still possible to die as one."

The officer scoffed. "You're going to come at me with that sword?"

"You jumped-up frothing nitwit," Julius said, "what kind of fool do you take me for?" His finger squeezed the trigger of the pistol concealed in the pocket of his housecoat. Red blossomed on the starched grey breast of the man's uniform, below his line of medals. He had enough time to look startled before he dropped.

Julius pushed the corpse outside and shut the door. He dressed quickly, but took the time to knot one of his school ties. It looked dreadful outside, wet thuds against the windowpane, and he slipped into an overcoat. He opened the chamber of the gun, checked the bullets, closed it again and slipped it into a pocket.

In the kitchen, he poured himself four fingers of the Macallan 1946 that he'd been saving for the right occasion, and let himself out into the garden.

Outside, snow became rain before rolling in fat drops over the withered delphiniums and foxglove, catching on the petrified thorns of his rose bush, and he wished it were spring. He watched the last streaks of gold bleed from the sky, swallowed by charcoal and indigo.

When the personnel carrier rolled up his driveway, Julius was sitting on the bench in his garden, the empty tumbler in his freezing hand, and even when they smashed through the back door, heavy boots trampling the frost-blanketed ground cover, he did not so much as move.


	5. The Shallow Drowned

The walls were closing in on her.

Within the network's hive of tunnels and secret rooms, only the War Room, built at the base of the cavernous ventilation shaft above Clapham North's air raid shelter, didn't trigger Nicola Murray's claustrophobia. Usually. But it was dark, lit by a kerosene lantern and the blue glow of her tablet, and in the sleepless, sunless delirium that blurred together her days and nights, her inner sanctum was as good as a prison.

She'd grown a shell, buried alive as she was beneath concrete and steel and poisoned soil and these days, her anxiety barely showed to anyone who didn't know her exceptionally well. She contained the trembling creature in a cage as rigid as the walls that surrounded her, and it was familiar and small and she observed it with a certain detachment: _Yes, here we are again, trapped together with no way out._

Most days, she could cope. Today, the frantic animal was rattling at its bars, growling at her, and she could swear the room was tightening like a noose around her chair.

Sundeep, who'd been in the Underground since the first round of purges, months before Nicola'd had to go into hiding, was blithely poking at the tablet's screen and humming to himself, apparently unaware that the War Room was shrinking. Were it not for a tremor in his leg, one could almost forget that he'd been concealing the whereabouts of his wife—Nicola's second-in-command—for almost two days.

"I think this is it." A flicker, and then an actual video stream, bounced through proxy servers in half a dozen countries to show Belfast in flames, the reporter narrowly ducking a Molotov, all of it watermarked with an Arabic squiggle in the bottom left of the screen.

She couldn't tell whether his verging-on-manic excitement was because the Regime was (according to the Al Jazeera broadcast) teetering on the edge of declaring Northern Ireland ungovernable, or the fact that after months of hijacking nearly all of the generator's power, he'd finally maneuvered his way around the Regime's firewall.

"I'm a bloody genius," he declared. The second one, then. Though the Belfast riots _were_ cathartic to watch, and they tied up the Regime's troops in a quagmire from which better governments had never quite managed to extricate themselves. It was, she thought, an _opportunity_. "You know there are maybe a hundred people in the entire country watching this?"

Dryly, though only half sarcastically, she said, "Where _have_ you been all my career?"

Sundeep dragged one of the chairs around to her and sprawled over it, his arms draped over the back. "Trying to overthrow the government."

"The Coalition, or our lot?"

He grinned, exposing crooked teeth slightly too large for his mouth. "Yes," he said. He'd been at Oxford when the first of the White Death attacks happened, and the slight matter of a sealed juvenile criminal record for breaking the CMA, plus an inconvenient skin colour, had drawn enough unwanted attention that he'd quickly become one of the Resistance's first recruits.

There had been an immediate trigger for her latest panic attack, and his wife—and by extension, he—had much to do with it. "Where's Sam, Sundeep?"

He seemed about to answer when the door opened and the woman herself said, quietly, "Right here."

Nicola looked up, past the point of Sundeep's shoulder as he rose to meet her, and the walls drew back, just slightly. Even by the somewhat lapsed standards of the Resistance, Sam was filthy, grease and blood smeared up the side of her face, limp strands of hair escaping from a messy ponytail, but Sundeep immediately caught her up in his arms, and the visible uncoiling of the long line of his body confirmed what Nicola had suspected. Sam had been off doing something dangerous and likely incredibly stupid, and her husband hadn't known where she'd been either.

The flutter of panic returned before she knew its cause, the sick dread in her stomach a tremor of thunder anticipating the lightning strike. A tall, thin shadow crept up behind Sam and leaned against the wall, arms crossed over his chest like he was already running the show.

"To be a revolutionary," Malcolm's caustic drawl apparently possessed some sort of time-travel capability, because it was enough to turn her into a fucking skittering schoolgirl, "is it not somewhat important to be able to tell yer left from yer fuckin' right?"

This was obviously one of those dreams where she'd gone to work without wearing any clothes, and no one had said anything for whatever reason, and she was going to be relieved when she woke and there was only the Regime and the dingy horror of the Tube's too-narrow tunnels. They were all staring at her now, Sundeep and Sam, the latter as self-satisfied as a cat presenting a half-dead mouse, and Malcolm, who in the sickly flickering of the lantern was every bit an apparition conjured from her omnipresent dread, a walking corpse in a badly fitted suit. The last one into the room was a man she'd never met before, a small, bearded guy with wide blue eyes who hovered close to Malcolm's side.

"Sam," Nicola said. "I need to talk to you, alone. Now."

"Leave her out of it," Malcolm said. "Aren't you going to say hello?"

Nicola steeled herself. She was the most wanted woman in the shambling and rotted remains of the United Kingdom, the top of State Security's hit list, Public fucking Enemy Number One, and Malcolm was nothing, a memory that belonged to a Nicola Murray who'd never had to order anyone's assassination. With ebbing desperation, she reached for the cliché. "I thought you were dead."

"Just your luck." There was something wrong with his voice; he was trying for bravado, certainly, but it was as if the words were squeezed through a sieve. "I'm a fucking vampire."

He looked ill—not that he hadn't always seemed one verbal explosion away from a massive coronary—but now he was downright frail, and another jolt of anxiety gripped her, because Malcolm was awful, it was true, and still irrationally terrifying, but whoever had done this to him was far, far worse.

"Sam—"

"I had to," Sam said before Nicola could figure out anything to say that was more dignified than a stream of jittery blather. "I had time-sensitive intel, and I made a decision, and it was the right call and _you know it._"

A brief silence fell over the room, then Malcolm said, "You look good, Nic'la." Which was a blatant lie, but accompanied by a paler copy of the charming half-smile that had probably saved him from a punch in the face or worse on more than one occasion. She wasn't sure whether she wanted to throttle him or feed him soup. "The hair suits you."

"Enough. I suppose you think you'll be taking over now."

He laughed, or tried to; it turned into a tubercular coughing fit that only stopped with a puff from an inhaler. So he _was_ sick, then. It ought to have made him less frightening. "I haven't come tae take over," he wheezed. "I've come for fuckin' asylum."

"And show some fuckin' respect," the man beside him barked. "Malc, say the word and I'll skin the saggy bint."

Malcolm limped to the chair Sundeep had abandoned, too close to where she was sitting though there were twelve more he could have chosen from. The lamp's flame lit the ridges age and starvation had gouged in his face, cast black shadows beneath his sharp cheekbones. "Nicola, this is Jamie. Jamie has some anger management issues, but he means well, yeah?" He looked around, at the shapes of the two guards posted outside the door, then down at the tablet that sat a few inches from his mangled right hand. "I see by the state of much of London that you're doing a fine job with the revolution."

She recognised that tone; it was the calm before the bollocking. "I am," Nicola said, well aware of cliff's edge on which she teetered. "Doing fine."

Then the thunderclap: "No, you're not 'doing fine,' ye daft hag. The country's in the hands of a government demonstrably more noxious and fuckheaded than the sickest wank fantasies of JB's inbred Etonian twat brigade. I was gone eight months—_eight fucking months_—before the fuckin' BNP took over. That's essentially the definition of 'not at all fuckin' fine.'"

"They're not actually the B—" Nicola started.

"Shut up!"

She braced herself, anticipating the verbal equivalent of the Volhynian Massacre, but it never came. He slumped in the chair, rubbing at his temples. Her eyes kept going to the misshapen angles of his fingers, and she wondered she'd be better to avert her gaze altogether, if it was obvious that she was staring.

His attention had shifted to Sundeep, who still had his arms around Sam. "And who the fuck are you?"

Sam went red. "My husband, Sundeep Gowda. Sundeep, this is—"

"_Husband?_"

"Did I mention Jamie's a priest now?"

"Get the fuck out," he said. Sam went for the door; Sundeep didn't know to do the same, so she yanked him by the elbow. Jamie didn't budge, and his eyes hadn't left Malcolm for a second. "You too; we'll have fuckin' words later." It was clear enough that the two men knew each other, that Jamie understood the threat that lay just beneath the surface of his words, but if he was intimidated at all, he didn't show it. Only when Malcolm appeared to be summoning the strength to stand and push him out did Jamie relent, leaving Nicola and Malcolm alone in a room that was suddenly far too small to contain the two of them.

"I don't like this," Nicola said, well aware that all three of the others were pressed up against the door, witness to at least the audio of her inevitable humiliation. "You being here, it's like nothing's changed, like I'm trapped in an endless loop of utter shit." When he didn't immediately bite back, she added, "I'm building something. People are starting to fight." She pushed the tablet across the table at him, Belfast's fury somehow inconsequential before the cold rage facing her. Malcolm barely glanced at the screen. "I know it isn't enough, don't you think I don't know that? But there's no one else. You've—you've been gone a long time. Everything's changed."

He was silent for another long, tense spell. Finally, Malcolm said, "You're not winning."

"You'd do better?"

"_You'd_ do better," he replied, and maybe it was almost conciliatory, almost _kind_, "with me whisperin' in your ear."

"Jesus. Are you propositioning me, Malcolm?"

He shifted to eye the door; she was aware, then, of why he'd thrown the others out when Sam would have defended to the death any word out of his mouth and this Jamie character hadn't wanted to let him out of his sight. They might not have recognised pure, animal fear, concealed as it was beneath all of his bluster, but Nicola? Nicola was well acquainted with terror, her own drawn to its mirror image like a magnet.

What the fuck had they _done_ to him?

She knew—and he knew that she knew—that he wanted to run. He couldn't; even the most cleverly forged identification couldn't disguise a face that had been plastered across every newspaper and television set in Britain for decades, couldn't hide the marks that prison had left on him, and besides, exile would have killed him faster than the Regime could.

"I'm not going to be your sock-puppet. I can't function with your…your fist up my arse."

"Attractive a prospect as that sounds," he waved his damaged hand at her, "it's not a possibility."

"You actually do need to listen to me. I mean, we have a structure, a, uh, chain of command, you can't just come here and—"

"I just did, though." He looked pleased with himself, though it was, at best, a halfhearted imitation of his old self. "We'll have the overbred wankstains out by the New Year, restore democracy to Great Britain, and then I'll put someone marginally less batty in charge, yeah? Deal?"

She'd fantasised about him getting his comeuppance for years, felt vaguely disappointed to see him shuffled off to some posh prison with an organic garden, and quite nearly forgotten about vengeance in the wake of what had followed. Now, while she could strangle Sam (and maybe she would; there were usually purges after revolutions, weren't there?) she was almost relieved that the only force in the universe more evil than the Regime was offering to join her side.

"I fucking hate you," Nicola said, but reached out to shake his hand. He started to do the same, then pulled back and gave her a crooked two-fingered salute.

And then he was storming out of the War Room, bellowing something about unholy matrimony, the fucking papacy, and the betrayal of everything he'd ever worked for, and she could at last breathe freely again.

* * *

Emma leaned across a stack of cement blocks, squinting through the rifle's sight, and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked against her shoulder, but the bullet had gone right through the Chancellor's eye, and she flashed a triumphant smile at Sam.

"You are," Sam admitted at last, "not complete shit."

It was an understatement; Emma was a better shot than Sam, at least with a paper target, but she didn't expect the other woman to say that much out loud. "My dad used to take me hunting." Sam made a disgusted face at this. "Yes, yes, I'm a posh bitch, you've only said it about a hundred times."

"The Regime's soldiers will put up more of a fight than a fox would."

Emma fired again, taking away what was left of the Chancellor's head, and was gratified to see Sam actually flinch. When the echo had died down somewhat, she asked, "Why are you even here, Sam? Isn't your time too important to waste on educating me in the art of guerrilla warfare?"

"Our Glorious Leader confined me to base." It was accompanied by an eye-roll no doubt honed from years of experience at Number 10, but Sam was, as far as Emma could tell, in a good mood. It was indication enough, though Sam hadn't said as much, that Malcolm was alive. Nice to know that she wouldn't be brutally slaughtered after all. "Why are _you_ here?"

Emma put the gun aside and sat down by Sam on a stack of overturned milk crates. Her ears were ringing despite the foam earplugs, the tunnel's walls still reverberating with the echoes of gunfire. Every so often, Sam glanced at a telegraph machine on a fold-out table, a World War II relic that she'd referred to as their internal e-mail service. "You never saw what the White Death did to people, did you?"

Sam shrugged.

"I thought, at first—" Ridiculous, that she had to justify herself to a _secretary_, but there it was. "I don't suppose you'd agree but it looked like the right thing, at first. We were under attack. And we stopped it, didn't we?"

"Yes," Sam said, the words acid on her tongue, "there are no more terrorists in Great Britain. Congratulations."

"Of course it went too far. Turned on itself, and there were _reasons,_ it was always _justifiable._" She shook her head. "They killed Peter, you know. Not the terrorists, his own government." Emma drew in a deep breath, held it, worried that the shake in her voice would give her away. If she ever mourned, for Peter or herself or anyone else, she'd certainly not do it in front of Sam.

"I'm sorry," Sam said, and she almost sounded like she genuinely meant it. "He seemed all right."

"He was an absolute git," Emma replied. "He had the political instinct of a mentally retarded Labrador retriever, and he was no threat to them at all, and they murdered him anyway."

"It's a brave new world," Sam said, and Emma couldn't help but envy her a little, this tough, efficient woman who had no doubt lost more than an incompetent boss and a handful of the colleagues she'd always vaguely resented, who'd been right about everything from the very beginning.

It was only starting to set in now, the knowledge that she'd walked away from her entire life. Even if she'd had no choice, even if her hand was forced by Weber and whoever had discovered her tiny, inconsequential acts of treason, she thought of her flat sitting empty of life, no doubt infiltrated by hovering drones transmitting a 24-hour feed to Ollie Reeder's office. She'd fled with nothing but the clothes on her back and the coordinates of a secret prison, she was surrounded by people who despised her, and she had as little place in the Resistance as she'd had in the Regime's machinery. It was enough to make her crave even the tiniest glimmer of empathy that Sam exhibited in her presence.

"The Glorious Leader wants to meet you," Sam went on. "Apparently she thinks you might be useful, and I'm no longer trusted enough to question you on my own. Impress her, and we might be allowed on a girls' night out to test that flawless aim of yours on some fascists. In a few decades, at any rate."

"She's that cross with you?"

"She'll get over it." Sam took the place where Emma had been crouching, and the abandoned rifle. "I never properly thanked you, by the way," she said, punctuating the sentence with a shot that finally knocked the poster from its tenuous perch by the tunnel's bend.

"Are we going to be friends, then?"

Sam turned, the expression on her thin, drawn face unreadable. "I could do with a friend," she said. "I mean, I could also use anything you know about the Regime's leadership and strategy and where they sleep at night and the Achilles Heel that will finally allow us to bring them down, but…" She ran a hand through her hair. "There comes a point when hate alone isn't enough to sustain you. I've been fighting them for so long I barely remember how it was before."

"There were press junkets," Emma said. "And computer clusterfucks."

"Rent-boy negatives."

"Leaked policy documents."

"The wrong tea order. Well, not by me." She managed a wan smile. "This isn't what I thought I'd be doing when I got into politics."

"Fetching tea, or plotting the violent overthrow of the British government?"

"Both, really." She stood up, retrieved the rifle, and replaced it in the locked cabinet that had once held tools for the maintenance workers. The fallen target remained where it was, soaking into a puddle of muck from a leak in the wall. "You get used to it," Sam said. "Living like a fucking rat, while up there, they…" She didn't need to say it; Emma knew better than she did. It was frightening now to remember how little had changed, how soon the drones and the checkpoints, the constant presence of armoured cars and the shrinking tide of human traffic in the streets became commonplace, how easy it had been to enact a simple policy change when one barely needed to worry about PR disasters.

The telegraph started making noise, and Sam bent over it to read the string of numbers it outputted on yellowed paper. As quickly as the mask had fallen, it was up again; Sam straightened her shoulders. "Time to go," she said, motioning for Emma to follow.

"Sam?" Emma called after her.

"Yeah?"

"It _will_ end. It can't go on like this forever."

Sam didn't answer, and her own words, resounding off the tunnel's walls, echoed back to mock her.

* * *

The deep-level shelter stretched for two miles and was meant to house thousands, but the ragged assortment of cots, mattresses, and bunks, dragged in from across the city, were strangely clustered together as though the rebels were afraid to be out of each other's line of sight. Malcolm had found the darkest, most remote corner—which, of course, Jamie had promptly invaded—where the glow of the tablet didn't draw aggravated mutters from people trying to sleep.

Sam had been convinced that he too should sleep, and he'd tried, only to wake up with his heart hammering and his lungs too constricted to issue a scream. Besides, he'd been asleep for four years, and in the meantime, the list of the dead, the documented atrocities and the accumulated intelligence collected on the device, none of it was getting any shorter. His eyes burned and his chest felt like a dog's squeaky toy but he scrolled through report after report.

He popped yet another caffeine tablet, waved the empty blister pack where Jamie could see it. "I've figured out how tae take down the Regime," Malcolm announced.

Jamie's stupid hairy face appeared over the side of the bunk, then, unfortunately, the rest of him, dropping down to sit at the edge of Malcolm's mattress. He'd had hours, practically a whole day, and so Malcolm could only assume that he was keeping the beard out of either a newfound allegiance to the Taliban, or pure spite. He gathered that he should feel grateful that Jamie wasn't wearing a fucking _collar._

"Yeah?" Jamie, bless his simple fucking heart—and Malcolm would never in a million years admit how good it was to just hear his voice again—actually sounded hopeful.

"We find out where they keep their store of these things and blow it up."

"That's the plan?"

"Aye. Don't know how humanity even functioned without them. Greatest fuckin' invention since autotune remixes." Even if he couldn't hear how weak he sounded, the look of pity—_pity, fuck_—on Jamie's face would have told him everything he needed to know. "Don't think I'm letting you off the hook about this priest bollocks either."

"We're no' talkin' about it."

"We are."

"I'm no' a priest now, am I?"

"Is it, what, a switch you turn on and off? One minute you're diddlin' choir boys and saying Hail fuckin' Mary's and the next you're a serious fuckin' person?"

The Jamie Macdonald he'd once known, priest or not, would have thrown a punch at his head for that. This one, though, was focused on a stain on the concrete by his feet. Malcolm liked that development even less than he'd liked finding out Jamie had returned to the bosom of the Holy Mother Church. "I needed tae hide."

"When the fuck," Malcolm said, "have you ever needed tae hide? Look, I need to know how serious this god-bothering business is. I'm knee-deep in mincing twats and stillbirths and have you gone kiddy-fiddler nutter on me or no?"

"Malc—" That was the warning, not that Malcolm had any intention of backing off. He didn't entirely trust Jamie, even if the man had literally carried him out from the jaws of Hell, but he'd be more useful than—Sam aside—whatever collection of tits Nicola had managed to assemble.

"Do you even believe in God?"

"What?"

"It's a simple fuckin' question."

"I dinnae see what—"

Malcolm placed the tablet aside and sat up. "Do you," he said, "fuckin' believe in some kind of benevolent fuckin' Almighty ponce with a great white poofty beard—"

"—which is none of your fuckin' _business_—"

"—because if ye do—" He didn't want to dwell on why exactly it was so vital, such a matter of _life and death_, that Jamie believe in nothing but Al Jolson, New Labour, and the superiority of Celtic FC. "If all I did dragging you kicking and screaming from the seminary into fuckin' _actual reality_ was for naught, I have a list of names the length of Ron Jeremy's cock, people we _knew,_ bairns fuckin' slaughtered in their cradles—"

Jamie stood up, narrowly avoiding bashing his skull on the steel underside of the top bunk. "I'm going out for a smoke."

"Jamie!"

"Go fuck yourself, Malcolm."

Malcolm moved to stop him and Jamie shoved him away and stormed off down the length of tunnel, and it was only by chance that Malcolm caught a glimpse of his face, unguarded and furious and what he saw there froze him in a grip of panic.

He tried for deep breaths, but his entire respiratory system was in open revolt. Scrabbled for the inhaler before he realised that it wasn't another asthma attack, that it was something he didn't dare name lest his suspicions become confirmed truth.

He hadn't asked after Jamie's girls, and Jamie hadn't mentioned them. Not once. _Fuck._

Malcolm gave it another minute and then stalked off to find Jamie.

The other man had only gotten as far as a cross passage, out of the way of most of the foot traffic. Maybe he'd wanted to be found. He was on a stool by a barricade of sandbags meant to slow the tide of piss and mud that flowed into the tunnels every time it rained, his cigarette down to the filter and the next perched, already waiting, on his thigh. Malcolm's lungs gave a perfunctory clench of protest as he approached, the smoke a thick veil between them that—and he was almost relieved—prevented him from standing as close as he might otherwise be inclined.

"When were you going tae tell me?"

Jamie looked up, and Malcolm, crippled or not, would have personally gutted every one of the fascist cuntwipes if it would have taken the despair from his eyes.

"I was waiting for the right time," Jamie said. "In between saving your withered arse and preventing your fuckin' suicide attempts and waiting for ye tae stop fuckin' shouting. You know. The perfect fuckin' moment tae recount the entire tragic cunting saga in graphic detail because it was such a _high priority_."

"How'd it happen?"

"Got them tae a refugee boat, one of the last leaving for France right before the embargo. The cunts bombed it just off the coast. They had no part in any of it, never did, Mary'd gone back tae her maiden name years ago, even…" He rubbed at the empty place where he hadn't worn a wedding ring in most of the time Malcolm had known him. "She wanted me tae come with."

"And you didn't."

"I wouldnae be here if I had."

"Jesus. Fuck, Jamie—"

"Don't," Jamie growled, "don't you dare say say yer fuckin' sorry. I was a shite father tae those girls, and a worse husband, but I saw that they were provided for. I sent them as far as I could, away from me and this shitshow. I tried, fuck, I tried so fuckin' hard."

"I know." Jamie visibly recoiled from the same pity with which he'd earlier assaulted Malcolm. He lit the end of the new cigarette with the old, tossing the fag-end into a brown pool, splintering the reflection of the lantern hanging on the opposite wall. His eyes shone, and Malcolm moved to block the view of anyone who might choose that particular moment to walk by.

He'd seen Jamie cry exactly once. It had involved divorce papers, a prodigious quantity of whisky, and a pub brawl that had nearly put Jamie in lock-up and another man in Casualty; at the end of it, Jamie was dripping spilled beer and sundry bodily fluids all over Malcolm's Armani and they'd never spoken about it afterwards. By those maudlin standards, he was being restrained; only the hitch of his breathing and the almost undetectable shudder of his shoulders gave away that anything was wrong.

It would have been better if Jamie would just hit something. Malcolm knew what to do with violence.

"Does it hurt?" Jamie asked, when he'd recovered enough to speak.

"The hand?"

Jamie wiped tears and snot away with his sleeve; his eyes were red-ringed but at least no longer leaking. "Drowning," he said.

Malcolm, never known for his compassion, said, "No."

"Yer a fuckin' liar."

"It doesn't hurt nearly as much as what I'll do tae every one of those cunts at the earliest fuckin' opportunity."

It would have been fine under the circumstances, Malcolm thought, to just put his arms around the man, but his own wounds were much too raw, and he didn't trust himself to be able to pull away after. Instead, he stood closer, braving the noxious fumes of Jamie's cigarette, close enough that he could feel the heat radiating from his body. He wished, desperately, that Jamie would stop looking at him like he, personally, was the only man in the world capable of avenging Jamie's family—Malcolm's own wee goddaughters that he barely knew—Julius, all of them.

Even if it was probably true. Nicola knew it, even if neither Jamie nor Sam would be willing to admit it. He was, somehow, the person tasked with destroying the Regime, and that was the only reason he wasn't dead.

He let Jamie finish his smoke in silence, his long inhales interrupted by the occasional hiccup. The lantern above them flickered, its flame failing.

"In answer tae your previous fuckin' question," Jamie said. "I do, actually, and it doesnae help any."

Before Malcolm could respond—and what was he supposed to say, what _could_ he say, and the psycho little shit wasn't supposed to have tragedies, had never had the ability to reduce him to speechlessness before—Jamie stabbed out the cigarette's embers and stalked back towards the shelter.


	6. Before the Storm Clouds Gathering

Terrance Price-Callaghan, Minister of Agriculture, adjusted his tie and looked directly into the camera.

Which, right away, was his first problem.

Lowell tapped on the glass separating the sound booth from the studio and pointed to his left; Price-Callaghan obligingly shuffled in absolutely the wrong direction, and Lowell struck his palm against the barrier and shouted an unheard, "No, look _that_ way" at the man.

_We are the nation's last bastion of defence against the forces of barbarism, the very face of civilisation, dignity, and honour, and this is what I have to work with. _Price-Callaghan gaped like a dying fish. Lowell understood, finally, why Malcolm Tucker had looked so fucking cross all the time.

His idiotic colleague finally in place, Lowell signalled for the address, which was to be broadcast live across every television and computer screen and e-billboard, to begin. Price-Callaghan stuttered through the introduction—the Regime, unlike its forebears, selected for competence, not media presence—and Lowell had almost tuned out the blandly reassuring buzz, when:

"—the food supplies remain absolutely safe, despite, er, rumours started _by the terrorists themselves_ that there is contamination, and might I remind the public that it was terrorists, not this government, initially responsible for the release of the White Death and if there _was_ any contamination, it was the work of—"

At which point Lowell was once again thumping on the glass, but the broadcast had to be live, that had been his idea because he'd foolishly assumed that Price-Callaghan would stick to the initial script and not sign his own death warrant and quite possibly that of many, many others.

Outside, beyond the glossy surfaces of the studio and the shining tower that encased it, the riots, and the crackdown, continued.

* * *

Three days earlier.

"What do ye mean I cannae smoke in the cunting War Room? It's set aside for the express fuckin' purpose of dealin' out death, is it not?"

"Other people's death, not ours."

"It's not as though I can go outside and have a fag and still be present to deal with whatever cock-up the Mouthy Bat Cunt's committed now."

"It wasn't Nic—oh, I give up. Malcolm, sort this."

"You could, and my _sincerest fucking apologies_ if it inconveniences you in some way, _not fucking smoke_ at all."

"Can ye remind me again why I saved your fuckin' life?"

Sam mouthed a silent, "Sorry" at Nicola and let the door close, doubting very much whether the men on the other side of it took any notice of the intrusion. According to Nicola, they'd all been difficult to the point where Sam's excommunication from the inner circle had to be prematurely revoked just to keep the peace. Nor were they even the worst problem Nicola had to face that week: Apparently a bomb had gone off where a bomb was expressly not supposed to go off, caving in part of the Piccadilly Line, costing seven lives, and burying a cache of supplies well beyond retrieval, not to mention drawing undue attention from the drones. Now the survivors from that cell wanted refuge at Clapham North, which was already overflowing, and Nicola was convinced they were too hot to be allowed near her own headquarters and needed to go elsewhere, comrades or not. It seemed a mini-mutiny was brewing around Stockwell, and Nicola's forces were stretched too thin to deal with it.

Sometimes Sam hated being indispensible.

"Okay," she muttered, and flung the door open again. Jamie flashed her a lunatic grin from where he sat at the end of the wide table, feet propped up on its edge, a—thankfully unlit—cigarette in one hand. Malcolm scowled and paced behind a veritable fort of file folders, newspaper clippings, and empty caffeine tablet wrappers. He'd locked himself in the War Room two days ago, Jamie had pounded on the reinforced steel door until Malcolm had finally relented and let him in, and all of Nicola's attempts to get back inside had been met with a staggering variety of anatomically improbable suggestions in ear-shattering stereo. Neither he nor Jamie looked like they'd slept since.

Sundeep had been allowed inside solely for his ability to virtually link Malcolm to the outside world. Now, he sat shell-shocked in front of his laptop, a lifelong anarchist whose paranoid suspicions about the inner workings of government had just been horribly confirmed. Sam gave him a little wave.

"The prodigal returns," Malcolm said, and he looked glad enough to see her that she thought he might have forgiven her for getting married, not that he was entitled to an opinion. "And she's brought the Central Committee with her."

Sam decided it was relatively safe, and motioned the others in—Nicola, a still skittish Emma in tow, Barry, an SWP dinosaur who, like Sundeep, seemed slightly baffled at how he'd ended up in movement led largely by the tattered remnants of New Labour, and Tim, a career soldier who'd publicly resigned following the coup. Ella Murray, eighteen years old, feral, and mean, remained just outside the door, rifle in hand, the future of British democracy.

"Right." Nicola dumped a stack of files on the table, a gesture no doubt intended to be dramatic but robbed of its punch when most of the papers inside went spilling out of their folders across the faux-wood surface. Sam, PA instincts contained but never completely quelled, immediately went to sort them. "We have targets, people. Emma here—" Emma ducked her head. "—has been completely cooperative in telling us everything she knows about them, so it's a matter of strategy, really."

"You're killing people now," Malcolm said.

"Yes, well, it is a _revolution._"

"I do get that they need to die. But. You, personally, Nicola Murray, MP. I mean, no fuckin' offense, but ye couldn't cut a paragraph out of a draft policy statement. Let's see, then." He dragged the open files towards him. "Bradley Weber, Minister of Public Safety—you couldn't get the psycho cunthair's _bodyguard_—and, oh, Ross Lowell, I've met that one. And his predecessors. Why is it that the Regime's propaganda ministers all have the average lifespan of a Spinal Tap drummer?"

"That was Sam," Sundeep said, pride edging his voice. Heat rose to her cheeks, and she avoided both his eyes and Malcolm's. "Because they had _our_ propagandist."

"Can we get on with it?" Nicola asked.

"I'm sorry, darlin', but how exactly do you intend to go about this? None of these twats so much as walks to the fuckin' kerb without an armed escort." Malcolm gestured at his massive wall of files. "I've been reading."

Tim cleared his throat. "It's not exactly meant to be a return trip for our men."

"Oh, oh, that's just great," Jamie said. "So, you've been losing several of ours for one of them that ye _maybe _sometimes manage tae kill, except that they seem tae have an unlimited supply of cunts, and we have—presumably, I mean, I didnae do the reading—a somewhat smaller supply of ready, willing, and fuckin' _retarded_ suicide bombers."

Tim half-rose in his chair, glaring at Jamie. Sam sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to blows, though she suspected that was exactly what Jamie was after. It wasn't wise, keeping him pent up in the tunnels for days, not with his generalised hostility and Malcolm no doubt needling him beyond the limits of anyone normal's endurance. She'd have to do something about him, and soon. "Where exactly did you find these people?"

She shrugged. "Prison. Church."

"We need to draw them out into the open," Sundeep said, his tone placating. "That's what we've been talking about. Shouting about. Whatever."

"This one—Terrance Price-Callaghan," Malcolm said, sliding a file back towards the middle of the table. "Minister of Agriculture? He'd not have as much need to be paranoid as the rest."

"He heads up ration distribution," Emma confirmed. "It's—well, not that dangerous, really. Not like security."

"But it's important," Nicola said. "There's a blockade, nothing's getting in, and so the Regime controls who eats and who starves."

"And if there were some disruption in that particular system…" Malcolm, tired as he was, looked more genuinely animated than he had since they'd hauled him out of the cell. "Nic'la, can you get a hold of a body or two?"

"What?"

"Corpses."

"Literally?"

"Aye. Preferably in less than utterly fucked up shape."

Nicola frowned, but said, "We have a food shortage, not a dead body shortage."

"Right," Malcolm said, "here's what we do."

Everyone—except Jamie, who'd probably suggested the idea, knowing him, and Sam, who'd never been easily fazed—listened to his explanation in stunned silence.

"People are going to die," Nicola said, when he'd finished. "Ordinary, innocent people."

"People have already died," Jamie replied, his voice low and dangerous, and Sam wanted to warn the others, the ones who didn't know about him, to tread carefully, except she couldn't do it with Jamie in the room. "This will work. Not just Price-Callaghan, but others, and fewer of ours."

"We need a line tae the outside," Malcolm went on as if the idea had already been approved. "You there, Katharine Gun." Sundeep startled at this. "Whatever anyone out there, civilians that is, whatever they're reading and watching and tugging to, I need you to get us on it. Make it known that the Regime's ration stores are contaminated with White Death residue. Don't stay anywhere for long, make it look like the Regime's burying it. The rest of you, light something on fire. Not fuckin' metaphorically speaking here. Oh, and Sam? Find me Ollie."

"What?" Nicola, rather than Sam, broke in.

"Ollie Reeder. I know he's alive, the man's a fuckin' cockroach. Does he know you're leading the Resistance?"

Nicola blinked. "No, I don't think so. No."

"Good. Find him. Bring him somewhere that's not here. I need him to get to the other two." He eyed the files disdainfully. "And I need more than this. Everything about these cunts—who they are, where they sleep, how frequently they take a shit…"

Nicola spluttered: "This isn't—they control every website, every newspaper, every fucking TV station—Malcolm, you're not going to take down the Regime with some…some revelation of the Chancellor's secret scat fetish."

"That said," Malcolm replied. "You have no idea how many governments have been felled by IBS."

Barry finally spoke. "Who the fuck are you, then, and who put you in charge?"

A beat, then, "I did," Nicola replied quietly. "He's the only person I know more ruthless than the lot of them. Worse, maybe, but if they can be fucked, if there is any way at all, he'll find the way to fuck them." She was watching Malcolm through those dark lashes, so fucking desperate, they all were, all of them just pretending that he was going to swoop in and save the day, like he wasn't halfway insane and he hadn't fallen apart long before the Regime had snatched up the reins of power.

He nodded in Nicola's direction, the acknowledgment barely there, but Sam saw it.

"So it's settled," Jamie declared, rather loudly. "I'll be having that fag now. Call me when the fuckin' shooting starts."

* * *

At the first sight of a bone white hand—and worse, white hair, spilling over the countertop of the Distribution Centre—the PHE set up a quarantine and banished the morning queue. Even with hazmat suits and gas masks, no one wanted to go near the body. It was only when a rat that had found its way out of the stores scampered, apparently unscathed, over the corpse's arms that any of the consummate professionals gathered at the scene were able to goad each other into approaching.

No one actually said the words "White Death" aloud. No one needed to.

The cause of death would later be determined to be a gunshot wound to the back, the hair a wig, and the skin and eye discolouration due to a coating of ash and limestone, but by the time the autopsy was concluded, a second colourless body had been sighted—and photographed, though the photos were immediately taken down—at a different Centre. Within hours, the first brick went through the first window, and by the time authorities announced an official cause of death and ordered citizens to remain calm, the damage was done.

* * *

The corridors of power were as bland as the former offices of DoSAC, a laboratory maze of off-white walls and beige carpeting, even the odd placid pastel watercolour framed above cubicle-enclosed desks. It was one of those great glass buildings removed from time and space; transplant it nearly anywhere in the world and there'd be no difference beyond the language spoken. Only the constant presence of the floating drones, humming with data, downloading and uploading and scurrying from release valves into the city below, served as a reminder that they lived in the fucking pristine future. No flying cars or hoverboards, just cameras recording every whisper, every movement, and given sufficient advances in technology that were almost certainly around the corner, every thought.

One of said drones levelled with Ollie's face, and its single red eye _winked_.

He rammed his fists into his own eyes, certain that he'd imagined it, but when the bright spots of green and purple cleared from his vision, the drone waited half a second, then quite deliberately did it again.

Something flashed on his monitor. He turned from the psychotic drone. A dialogue box had appeared on the screen.

HEY DICKSTAIN

He spun in his chair, heart pounding, but there was nothing human in sight, just the drone, bobbing in the air behind him.

NEVER MIND THAT. GET TO VAUXHALL STATION. NOW.

Ollie typed.

WHO ARE YOU? HOW ARE YOU DOING THIS?

WITCHCRAFT. XXX.

His hand hovered over the M key, then he thought better of it and instead let fly a litany of curses. There were a number of things he wanted to type, exit routes out of the inevitable morass that awaited him if he agreed, but while he was exceptionally good at navigating disaster once it struck and coming out on top, he was less than perfectly skilled at avoiding it in the first place.

OK

The dialogue disappeared. A second later, the drone buzzed its way out of his office. He looked around again, sure there was a trap waiting to close on him, some sort of fucked loyalty test, but it was after six and the office was nearly deserted.

He shut off the laptop, threw on a coat and scarf, and went outside to hail a cab.

* * *

It was the second straight night of food riots, and by the time Ollie asked the driver to pull over, fires were already dancing over the black surface of the Thames. The route he would have taken was fenced in with barbed wire on one side and a gathering mob on the other; a shiny car in the midst of a horde of yobbos was more of a target than he planned to be. He paid the man, tipping him extra to keep his gob shut, and walked the rest of the way.

Across the river from sporadic gunfire, he had to wonder if they'd planned it this way, then realised that he was attributing a level of organisation to the Resistance that was typical of the Regime. Still, there wasn't a grey uniform to be seen south of the Thames, which couldn't entirely be coincidence. Vaguely unsettled, he kept walking, casting the odd nervous glance through gaps in the red-brick buildings at the distant flames. He swept aside an overgrown swath of dying ivy to duck through one of the doors a few blocks from where the fencing began.

He didn't flatter himself enough to think that the Resistance genuinely trusted him, but with most conventional information and supply channels closed to them, they couldn't exactly avoid dealing with him. Accordingly, he'd been to a number of their outposts and knew their convoluted pathways into the Underground. This one was a labyrinthine route through never-finished block of flats and stalled waterfront development, at the end of which was a crude tunnel, dug out of wet earth and buttressed with unsteady lumber, guarded by a pair of boys who looked as though they should still be in school.

"Hope there's not a password," he said, forcing a smile. They continued to watch him in stone-faced silence. "If so, it's probably 'cunt'."

"Go on in," one of the boys said, so either they'd been expecting him, or he was right about the password.

Vauxhall Station had been hit by conventional weaponry during the war, and its shattered remains were less of a base than a convenient skulking ground. There wasn't a single Tube station left that wasn't eerie in its emptiness, but this one had been the scene of a massacre, and the twisted metal of the pulled-up tracks stood in stark memorial to the bomb that had ripped through the station at rush hour. One or two of the emergency lights still washed the dusty platform in sulfurous yellow.

Malcolm was already sitting on one of the benches, the Grim Reaper in a military surplus coat, and while Ollie had known he was alive and in the hands of the Resistance, it was still a shock to actually see him. He didn't look well enough to have gotten into the station on his own steam, so Ollie assumed that the tunnel's shadows contained numerous armed rebels.

He could have sworn he'd been practicing something clever to say on the way over, but what came out of his mouth as he sat on the bench was, "Are you here to kill me?"

Malcolm snorted. "What the fuck do you think this is, fuckin' Le Carré? Nice to see you too."

"It's, sorry, it's just a bit like the end of a slasher film when you think the killer's dead and the last girl walks by him, and he reaches up like RARGH."

"Rargh." Jamie stepped out of the tunnel, every bit the terrorist Ollie had always suspected he was at heart, wild-eyed and bearded with a rifle slung over his shoulder, and seemingly more at ease in military cast-offs than he'd ever been in a suit and tie. If three years of the Regime's rule had added centuries to Malcolm's appearance, it had left Jamie entirely unscathed. "Did he just piss himself? I think that's piss, don't you?"

Malcolm didn't seem amused, and Ollie bit back a rejoinder—he had, after all, recently watched a surveillance video of Jamie smashing a man's head to pieces. His greatest hits collection of evisceration threats and rampant demolition of innocent pieces of office equipment seemed considerably more disturbing in hindsight. Jamie sneered over him, crowding in so that that he had the veritable Sophie's Choice of breathing in fetid cigarette breath or sliding closer to the animated skeleton to the right of him.

Hemmed in by maniacs, he opted for bravery. "The Regime knows you're back with the Resistance," he said to Jamie. "At least, Ross Lowell does."

"Aye," Jamie said. "And how does he know that?"

Ollie ran a hand through his hair, tugging at the curls in annoyance. If he was going to be murdered, it wouldn't be for giving them Jamie's name. "Fuck, does it matter? He knows everything. He had Malcolm's cell under surveillance—it was all part of his plan, his and fucking Weber's. You didn't escape; he _let_ you go. They're probably tracking you here right now."

Malcolm turned slightly to reveal a piece of gauze, spattered with dried blood, on the back of his neck. He might have guessed that Malcolm had managed, thus far, to stay slightly ahead of Lowell. Lowell was no doubt the brightest in the lengthy line of Propaganda Ministers, but that was damning with faint praise. "Saves me the trouble of being nice to your ex."

"Yes, well," Ollie said. "They know you're behind the food riots too, and there're orders to shoot you on sight. Lowell was certain you were—" He made a motion around his ear. "—or he wouldn't have used you as bait."

"You're mates then, you and Lowell?" Malcolm asked. "Go for pints together, play squash, how does it work?"

His voice, wafer-thin and bleating even to his own ears: "I'm trying to survive, Malcolm."

"Far be it from me to judge. You're really on our side?"

"Yes," Ollie said. "I'm not a fucking monster."

"Do ye tell the other twat the exact same thing?" Jamie asked.

"Be nice, Jamie. I'm sure when the little Oxbridge twat sits down tae filet fuckin' mignon and champagne with his Nazi cuntstain friends while we starve on stolen rations and watered-down fuckin' piss and get shot at, he tells himself that it's all for the greater good."

"Christ, Malcolm," Ollie groaned. "Do you always have to be so _fucking melodramatic?_ What is it that you even want?"

"Oh," Malcolm said, almost cheerfully. "I want you to get to know the inflated fuckin' pustule a little better. Make him trust you. Get on his good side if you're capable of making anyone not want to smack you."

Ollie told himself that one did not go around hitting people twice one's age, especially the living dead, and also that he wouldn't bet on himself in a fair fight with Malcolm, let alone Jamie. Not that Malcolm had ever been in a fair fight in his life.

"Right," Ollie said. "That's all, yeah? No big deal."

"See if you can lift his mobile while you're at it," Jamie added.

Malcolm stood, albeit not without what seemed like considerable effort, and Jamie hovering close by. He grinned his apex-predator smile, exposing far too many teeth. "One more thing. Tell Lowell that once I've toppled the Regime, destroyed everything he's worked for, taken away everything he fuckin' loves, consigned him tae the fuckin' dustbin of history, and fucked him so hard that his great-grandchildren are walking funny—tell him I'll kill him slowly. Tell him that he dies fuckin' _last_."

He was halfway into the darkness of the tunnels before Ollie managed, "Is Emma…"

Malcolm turned, silhouetted in the orange light, and Ollie expected murder to be written in those eyes, but the expression on his face was distant, preoccupied. "Is Emma what?"

"Is she safe? I don't expect she's okay, but—"

"She's fine," Malcolm said, and Ollie told himself that the relief he felt was no more than a longing for the familiar. "Same time, three days. Talk to fuckin' Lowell and come back with something interesting."

Faintly, Ollie said, "It's a date."

He thought he heard Jamie mutter, "fuckin' lovesick Poxbridge ponce," as the two retreated into the tunnels.

* * *

_"—If there _was_ any contamination, it was the work of the very same terrorists who threaten this great nation and are willing to use illegal chemical weapons to undermine the very basis of our way of life…"_

Lowell rang Weber. "It's the PR equivalent of 'whoever smelt it, dealt it.' He has to go—"

"Not on the fucking phone, Ross. Meet me downstairs."

He bashed through the office door, startling a drone hovering just outside, and practically threw himself down the staircase. Weber stood on the first floor, arms folded behind his back, a broad-shouldered military man in a grey uniform and mirror shades. "—because his explosive case of verbal diarrhea very strongly implies that the ration supply is less than secure and the terrorists _have_ in fact managed to kill two people with the White Death."

"So I gather." The subtleties of verbal snafus were often lost on Weber; fortunately for the case Lowell was trying to make, Price-Callaghan's cock-ups were hardly subtle. "You want to throw him to the wolves?"

Lowell glanced around at the drones; a few were in eavesdropping range, but he had a jamming field and Weber was standing close enough. "I don't see how there's a choice," he admitted. "It's hit international news, you know. We've blocked it but the attacks against the firewall keep coming. And the streets…"

"I've looked out the window," Weber said.

"It _is_ faked, isn't it?" He'd had a gnawing of doubt, not having seen the bodies himself.

"Of course it's faked," Weber snapped. "It's not even a _good_ fake."

"It didn't need to be," Lowell said. If only Malcolm Tucker's ability to feign insanity had been as utter shit as his ability to mimic the effects of the White Death with a pair of shot-up, rotting rebel corpses—but he'd gotten what he'd wanted in both cases, hadn't he?

Weber shared equal responsibility for this particular clusterfuck, and Lowell didn't trust him not to throw _him_ to the wolves if it came down to it, if the Chancellor ever found out. "He needs to be seen, live, at the location. Send a security detail, but—"

"Don't say it."

"Have the two Centres quarantined and sanitised. We'll put him at an untainted one, stuffing his gob with a fucking ration bar and looking happy about it."

"And the riots?"

"They stop tonight, preferably before Price-Callaghan has to go on camera. By whatever means necessary."

* * *

Stretched out on a rooftop, Sam peered through the rifle's scope at the scene unfolding at the Distribution Centre several blocks away. Her breath was frozen in the morning cold, puffing white in front of the lens, and even with the gloves, her fingers were chilled. She'd made more difficult shots before, but it was broad daylight and timing was key, and it was almost a pity that she couldn't have brought Emma. She glanced at the kid keeping watch, at the cab, circling around the tanks blockading the Centre's immediate vicinity. She checked her watch.

Price-Callaghan stepped in front of a microphone. A long line of grey uniforms flanked him and the press's presence was limited to the Regime's own publicity department and a handful of official media, but it was nevertheless the closest any Regime official had been to the citizenry since Sam had made it clear that the slightest attempt at public relations was an incitement to assassination.

He seemed nervous. He kept looking down at the ration bars in his hands. The hair on the back of his head was thinning, and he was underdressed for the weather.

Sam took pity on his audience and fired before he could speak.

The splash of red as much confirmation as she was likely to get, she motioned to the boy, then took the stairs down to the top floor. Ducking into an office, she shed the black clothes and the gloves and balaclava, straightened her hair, and walked into the elevator. The boy stayed behind, waiting until she was stepping into the cold, bright sunlight—how long had it _been_?—and into the cab, which circled one last time before picking him up at the corner.

They were stopped and searched at the checkpoint—"Ma'am, do you realize that the Minister has just been _shot_?"—but her ID, and the boy's, sufficed. As they waved her past, she pressed her face against the window, closing her eyes to feel the sun on her lids for as long as she could, the daylight golden and perfect and everything she'd ever missed.

* * *

In the War Room, in the early hours of the morning, Nicola tallied the dead.

Reports were still flooding in, though at this point any count was mostly conjecture. Sundeep had planted the first seeds online that Weber had also been killed in the strike, and despite the Regime's attempts to kill the story, it had snowballed quickly enough that Nicola was prone to doubt _everything_ she heard, from any side. In addition to Price-Callaghan, three Regime soldiers had been killed trying to quell the riots, which were still popping up in ration-dependent parts of the city. The rioters themselves had lost between ten and fifty, depending on which continental news service one believed.

The greatest loss to the Resistance was the sniper rifle Sam had been grudgingly forced to abandon on the roof, lest the checkpoint guards conduct a search.

"One down," Malcolm said.

"It worked," Nicola said. "This time. I don't think Weber will be so quick to step out into the open after this."

"Haven't you heard?" Malcolm replied. "He's already dead. It was on CNN and everything."

She put the tablet aside, walked over to a cupboard by the door, and retrieved a dark brown bottle and two chipped ceramic mugs. Sundeep brewed the stuff in the boiler room, and it didn't taste like anything so much as windscreen wiper fluid and mud, but the assassination of a high-profile Regime minister called for a celebration. Even if she had nothing but moonshine and no one but Malcolm to drink it with, she'd take her victories where she could.

He stared down at the liquid while she sipped at hers, swilling it in a mug that read "World's Best Grandpa," then drained it, coughing and swearing as it burned its way down his throat. "What the _fuck,_ Nic'la," he growled, though he was already reaching for the bottle again. She'd always liked him better when they'd both been drinking, and she suspected the feeling was mutual.

She could feel its effects already kicking in, the inevitable despair following on the heels of her temporary elation, the weird time-lapse that came from a career in politics where fifteen minutes was an eternity and three years a lifetime.

After a long pause, and the world swimming before her, she said, "Malcolm? Are we going to win?"

"This fuckin' guerrilla Womble act," he said. "It isn't for me. I'm a worse revolutionary than you are. So it's win or join the Regime." At her look, he added. "Fuckin' joking, sweetheart. I'm going to cut out their livers with a spoon and you'll get all the credit."

Impulsively, she reached over to take his hand; he snatched it away before she could actually make contact. "Don't get all misty-eyed at me, ye daft cunt," he snapped. "Ye don't want tae go down that road. One sappy fuckin' twat around here is more than fucking enough." He slid the emptied mug towards her and climbed to his feet, presumably in search of the sappy twat in question. "Hey," he said over his shoulder. "I didn't claw my way out of a fuckin' Gorbals tenement and into power just to die in the fuckin' Tube. I travel by cab. These cunts, they're pretenders to the throne, it won't last. It never does."

She'd hated him for so long, and to no small degree she still did. That didn't stop her from mumbling a nearly inaudible, "Thank you," at the door as it whispered shut behind him.


	7. Little Liars Into Heroes

The days, or what passed for them in the grim fortress of Clapham North, could almost have been bearable. Malcolm was a good liar, always had been, and while neither Jamie nor anyone else who'd known him before was thick enough to actually believe that he wasn't coming apart like bits of wet toilet paper, he'd always been a master of shared illusion. He unleashed his once-legendary ferocity on Nicola's beleaguered underlings, a veritable whirlwind of chaos and fuckery battering at the Regime's door, and if his voice gave out mid-shout and he resigned himself to summoning Jamie to continue a bollocking, well, they could all pretend that he had better things to do.

Alone—though they rarely got to be alone—they bickered over strategy, and it was like the old days, Malcolm sharp-tongued and scheming and Jamie permitted to snipe back at him because in the end, they both knew he'd go to hell and back to do Malcolm's bidding every fucking time. He did not allow himself to think that he'd been forgiven, neither for the Tom Davis farce (not that he was remotely sorry for that, even now) nor for his return to the priesthood (which they did not discuss, ever, lest Jamie be subjected to the full force of Malcolm's Thoughts About Religion and Roman Catholicism In Particular), but a truce was definitely in order because whatever else you could say about Malcolm and his ability to hold a grudge, he did have a sense of priorities and besides, Jamie'd always been one of the few people who actually noticed when he was being funny.

If Malcolm hadn't—as Whitehall rumour had once suggested—ever needed to sleep, Jamie might have been able to get by. Alas, again contrary to gossip, he was actually human, and would, every few days or so, inevitably drag himself back to his bunk at the very end of the shelter and collapse in the murk of some re-routed fucking foreign broadcast, which was typically when Jamie would feel his precarious self-control give way, and remember where the fuck he actually was.

Had Jamie possessed even a modicum of perspective, he might have convinced himself that Malcolm was not in any imminent danger of suddenly dropping dead, and that 220 feet underground and surrounded by armed rebels was about as safe as London got these days, and he might then have found something else to occupy his time besides lying on the top bunk and monitoring every catch in the wheezy cunt's laboured breathing.

Instead, the situation was rapidly deteriorating into fucking intolerable. He found himself watching, through the gap between the mattress and the wall, Malcolm in the grip of some nightmare. Jamie wished he could invade Malcolm's dreams and take a shit all over whatever was making him whimper like that. He wasn't good at sharing sleeping space, as his ex-wife had never hesitated to inform him, but the bunk above Malcolm was infinitely worse than lying restive beside Mary. Not to mention that Malcolm would commit seppuku if he'd known that he was making pained little noises in his sleep and Jamie could hear it all.

In his other life, the one he could no longer think of as normal, he'd only seen Malcolm asleep once, and it had practically been the death of him. It had involved some party conference with an entire Special Olympics decathlon of various flavours of imbecility, and saw them holed up in Malcolm's hotel room, drinking furiously to ease the burden of being the cleverest people in a government full of tossers, wankers, and outright tits. After nearly seventy-two hours of Red Bull-and-gin-fueled psychosis, Malcolm had passed out on the bed, still in a fucking tux. Jamie'd paced for what seemed like hours deciding what to do about it, then tugged off his shoes and—carefully, as if disarming a nuclear warhead—loosened his bowtie and tossed a blanket over him. That was already going too far, and he knew it, but he'd been closer to Malcolm than he'd ever managed to get before, and he attributed to divine intervention the restraint that had somehow kept him from torching his career and marriage by pressing a kiss to those thin, sleep-slackened lips.

He'd thought then—and, later, blamed the toxic stew churning through his bloodstream for the flourish of sentimentality—that he'd have happily died for Malcolm. Or, at least, the man Malcolm had been in those days, incendiary and brilliant, before the Nutters got their claws into him and turned him into a ragged, empty caricature of himself, a tool to be used and discarded by the most toxic of opportunistic jizzrags.

Now, though, it was worse, now Jamie had no career, and no marriage, and nothing to live for besides Malcolm and revenge. The latter was a distant mirage, and what remained of the former was entirely too close and real and had no right to be so vulnerable, so embarrassingly human. Every crease and hollow outlined in the faint, pulsing light of the tablet's power indicator, he had a face that more properly belonged to a Christian martyr than a ruthless political operative, and not for the first time Jamie wondered how other people managed to not just die from just looking at him.

Out of habit—it gave him something to fidget with when pacing or shouting wasn't an option—he fumbled for his rosary, but it had disappeared from where he'd draped it over the bunk's railing. Restlessness metastasising into irritation and a pressing need for a fag, he climbed down the ladder, pausing only momentarily to make sure that Malcolm hadn't stirred. It wasn't like he was getting to sleep any time soon. He made his way to the barricade and lit one of his diminishing supply of cigarettes and thought about Weber, and Lowell, and the fact that London's hard water made the tea taste like shite, anything but fucking Malcolm.

Something moved in the darkness beyond the barricade, too noisy to be a rat, and he was instantly on high alert, hand on his rifle, stepping over the gap in the sandbags to press into the shadows that clung to the tunnel walls. Whoever it was splashed ahead of him, through an inch of black water, and he followed, quieter, tugging a balaclava over his face.

At the end of the passage was a connection to the station, and he followed the now-visible figure across the tracks until it vanished up one of the unused maintenance ladders; he waited, then climbed up after, saw a flash of black against the dull bulk of the staircase leading up to surface level.

There was a strain, then, a rubber band stretched slightly too far, at the thought of leaving—_abandoning,_ as if he owed anything to Malcolm or the Resistance or anyone else—but his instincts for treason were too finely honed after committing no small number of acts himself to let some cunt steal past him, unannounced and unauthorized, into the outside world.

He followed for blocks, stopping involuntarily to clasp at the cold metal bars of a gate outside a mass of drab slate-grey buildings as he sucked in his first gasp of fresh air in weeks. Up ahead, he could hear some sort of commotion, the unmistakable sounds of shattered glass and the cacophony of gunfire, and his years of near-solitude and contemplation in the arms of the One True Church had not left him such a changed man that a part of him didn't yearn desperately for a decent brawl.

A cold wind rushed past him, and he blinked to see a swarm of surveillance microdrones, followed by a heavier, armed craft that rose like an awkward seabird in their wake. He flattened his body against the lee of the closest tower—an animal reflex—intellectually, he knew that the drones sensed body heat as well as visuals, but they were apparently less interested in him than whatever was happening where the road led out to a row of shops. He crept up along a concrete ramp overlooking the excitement, peered down in time to see the lithe figure in black run out to join the throng of rioters lobbing bricks at the line of plate-glass-shielded troops at the intersection.

Some of the rioters were still snatching anything they could from the handful of storefronts not already boarded up, but their numbers were thinning as Jamie slid along the ridge, half of them bleeding out into the slush-lined roads. Most wore hoods and masks in flagrant violation of any number of laws; none of the dead and dying, from what he could see, looked old enough to vote.

_We started this,_ he thought, and allowed himself the unfamiliar stab of guilt because even that was better than reminding himself that Aileen might have been the age of those weans, if he'd not got her killed by trying to save her.

Moving along the barrier, he tested the door at the top. Open, a massive slab of hideous utilitarian architecture with countless floors to hide in. He could slip away, wait this out, slink back down into the Tube when the inevitable end came. He might have, had the identity of his runaway—now as cornered as the rest, shooting wildly—not occurred to him with a sudden, painful clarity.

It was stupid, horribly fucking stupid and possibly suicidal, but the promise of violence was intoxicating, and they were just so fucking _young_, Tiananmen Square and the Prague Spring and _Blake's 7_ all rolled up together in cunting Brixton. Besides, he shuddered to think what Nicola might do to him if he returned and Ella didn't; worse, to think of the precise way in which she'd crumble, taking the nascent rebellion with her. In his mind, there was nothing beyond the cold Atlantic Ocean and survivors clinging to the bombed wreckage of a ship, screaming for help while the Regime's dog-fucking bawbags looked on, unmoved.

It might be a short-lived revenge, but the world would hardly be lesser without him, and certainly much improved with the removal of a number of goose-stepping twats.

He turned back to face the fray, eyes just above the rim of cement, and every impulse he'd carefully contained for weeks roiling just beneath his skin. He didn't think that it would outweigh the multitude of sins, real and imagined, that he'd committed in his disreputable and tumultuous career, but he took aim at the armed drone spilling death above the rampaging youths, and blasted it out of the sky.

The cloud of microdrones banked sharply and flew for him; he batted them away, surprised at how readily the tiny spheres cracked against the concrete, shooting into the ranks of grey uniforms as he ran down the ramp, flung himself over the barrier, and knocked Ella Murray to the muddy ground. Before she could struggle free, he dragged her, one arm crooked around her mouth, the other firing at the soldiers, through the tower door and into the decrepit lobby. She kicked and bit his arm and he nearly had to let go of her before he'd managed to manhandle her into a stairwell. The mad girl squirmed and hissed like a scalded cat, but he'd a considerable history of knocking down drunken Rangers fans who'd staggered into the wrong pub, and, unlike Malcolm, had absolutely no compunctions about hitting women.

"Let go of me, you piece of shit!" He could all but see the adolescent snarl beneath the black wool of her mask. He was sure now that it was her, having caught glimpses of her now and then when she was on guard duty. He'd heard, via unofficial channels he'd not admit to having before the coup, that the little hellion was the one responsible for turning the rest of Malcolm's hair grey during Nicola's ill-fated tenure at DoSAC, but she wasn't permitted inside meetings and he'd not had much to do with her.

He shoved the girl in the direction of the stair. "Up. Now. They'll be coming for both of us."

Her dark eyes, Nicola's eyes, narrowed. "I know you."

"Keep moving. D'ye think this is some kind of game, ye retarded gash?"

With each flight, the noise of the gunshots retreated, and the girl seemed less determined to fight him. On the landing of the sixth floor, after scanning for the presence of cameras, he magnanimously allowed her to sit down.

"Fuck you," Ella said weakly.

He sagged against the wall, tar-bunged lungs heaving with exertion, reviving only to snap at her when she went to peel off her sweat-drenched balaclava.

"They're dying down there."

"Aye," Jamie said. "An' naught ye can do about it, except tae not join them."

"I can help," Ella said. "I've done it before."

"Right, yeah, you're Mrs. fuckin' Peel, I get it." He rolled his head in her direction. "That tunnel ladder's not guarded?"

"Hardly ever."

He pushed back the germ of an incredibly ingenious idea—it could wait until he had her out of harm's way—and checked his ammunition supplies. "Come here often?"

"When I can."

"It stops tonight. You'll do as yer told."

"Or what?" she snit.

"Or I tie you tae the tracks by yer own fuckin' entrails, ye demented demon twat."

He watched her, hoping she'd reel, vaguely pleased when she didn't. The bully, the one with the straightening iron and the comprehensive school, not the eldest who he'd heard was in hiding with the little ones; she was near tears for some reason, holding back the best she could, and losing, but she wasn't frightened of him. It was an effort, not to resent Nicola for her still-living brood of brats. His jaw itched where the mask pressed the wiry hairs back into his skin. Malcolm was right; the beard had to go, at least if he planned on exercising his frustrations with the particular direction his life had taken by using the Regime's shock troops for target practice.

"It'd destroy your mam."

"She wouldn't notice. Too busy with the _revolution._"

"She would. Believe me."

"You don't know her."

"She was never at home and every time she put her foot in it—which was every time she drew a fuckin' breath from what I hear—the wee fucks at school pushed your head into the loo and flushed. And now she's got you trapped underground and still doesnae have the time for ye."

Ella curled her arms around her knees, leaned her head against her forearm. "So what?"

"She cares, ye daft bint," he said, wondering which one of them was actually doing the confessing, and gripped with a frantic desire to bolt. He wasn't meant for this, hiding in stairwells and laying his soul bare for some weepy posh teenage hellspawn. "She can't help that she's shite at it." He looked outside the tiny window at the top of the landing, barred and streaked with an unidentifiable substance. He couldn't hear gunshots anymore; he assumed that the troops had smeared the miniature uprising into red paste and moved on. "Listen," he offered. "That shitshow down there? It's on me, well, and Malcolm, but the _Express_ will shut its gob about Diana before he fuckin' apologizes for anything. Ye dinnae need tae fix this."

"You, then?"

He nodded, gripping his rifle for emphasis. Already, a plan to slake his bloodlust and not inconsiderable boredom was forming. "But your mam, she fuckin' needs ye. She cannae love ye, pet, not properly. You're old enough tae understand that. But she needs the idea of you. She needs ye tae be fuckin' _alive_."

Ella stared, and for a terrifying moment he was convinced that she _knew,_ it was bad enough with Malcolm and Sam shooting him concerned looks and thinking he didn't notice, but at least they were actual adults even if neither of them had children. He carried his grief like a dry drunk carried his rage, obvious even to a spoiled little shit like her.

"We'll go back tae base," he said, not unkindly. "I'll make a cuppa."

"Fuck that," Ella replied.

"That fuckin' pish you people drink, then. Paint stripper and rat spadge." This at least got a girlish giggle, which was un-fucking-acceptably civilised as far as he was concerned. "Get tae fuck, then," he roared at her. "And put yer mask back on. You want tae be featured on the Regime's Barely Legal Rebels page three wankbait? Fuck."

Ella clung to his arm like her life depended on it, like his did, and together, they made their way back down to the silent, blood-seeped streets.

* * *

An hour or so later, after he'd installed Ella in her section of the shelter with a whispered promise to excruciatingly slowly remove the top layer of skin from her face and use it to replace his balaclava should she ever even consider stepping foot outside of the station without her mother's express permission, and managed a quick shave that left his jaw raw and scabby, he found Malcolm lying awake, muttering an extensive inventory of verbal filth and tapping with obvious frustration at the tablet with his left hand. (He'd never quite gotten the hang of touch-screens and had all but required an exorcism when Sundeep had meekly informed him that Blackberry had gone under a year after the coup.)

He barely looked up as Jamie sat heavily beside him, but muttered, "If you weren't homeless and living in the Tube, I'd scour your attic for ugly portraits. It's not fuckin' natural." Which was as close to a kind word as anything he'd said to Jamie in half a decade, and Jamie's traitorous jessie heart, which had never been anything approaching sensible where Malcolm was concerned, misfired like a backed-up engine.

He was still shaking. If the sight of children, even children shot down in the street, was enough to trigger panic or sorrow, he'd never have lasted as a priest, not even in a geriatric village where the average age rapidly approached that of AC Milan. It was just that, were it not for the infinitesimal weight of the photograph he carried with him, always, even into the killing fields of Brixton's streets, he'd fear forgetting his daughters' faces.

It was just that there was so little in his life that mattered anymore, and what did, mattered so fucking _much._

"You left," Malcolm said, far too flatly for it to be a proper accusation.

"Had places tae be," Jamie replied. "Glummy Mummy's bairn tae rescue."

That, finally, was enough to make him more interesting than the _Irish Times'_s article on the various ingenious means by which refugees from the North bypassed the Partition Wall. Jamie's boots were caked with drying mud and ASBO-gore, and he took it as a sign of Malcolm's mental decrepitude that he hadn't yet been filleted for tracking it all over the floor. "Really."

"I like her. Great big fuckin' bollocks for a wee yin. It's sorted; she willnae get loose anymore."

If he was waiting for approval—he knew better, of course, but it might have been nice after he'd been a _genuine fucking hero_—Malcolm wasn't forthcoming. But nor did he flinch away, which was almost progress as far as Jamie was concerned, and Jamie was thus permitted to be close enough that, if Malcolm were a regular person and not some kind of Nosferatu with antifreeze for blood, he might have felt the warmth radiating from his skin.

"You should see the Wikipedia edit wars on Weber," Malcolm said in lieu of actually having a civilised conversation. "He's Schrödinger's fuckin' Dirty Den. They can't decide if we killed him or not." He tilted the tablet in Jamie's direction, as if Jamie gave two solid steaming fucks about what obese American basement-dwellers had to say about the Regime. Though he supposed a clusterfuck of misdirection, even an ultimately harmless one well outside the borders of their green and buggered land, was making _someone,_ somewhere, in the Regime unhappy. At least he hoped so. Still, if Malcolm was resorting to getting his kicks from reading Wikipedia, they really were fucked. "Sundeep is not complete shite in the dirty tricks department."

"The Poxbridge cunt's got potential, then?"

"Aye, though he's a fuckin' _blogger_ and he's shagged my PA so he's up against the wall once we're through."

"I'll do the blindfolds," Jamie said. "She could have married a journo. That'd be worse, yeah?"

Malcolm flashed him the pained grimace that passed for one of his smiles, and it was back to business. "It's no' enough," he said. "They can't be had by a PR flap, even Nicola would have done it by now. The only cunt terminally brain damaged enough tae pop his head out of his bunker has had it shot off." He leaned up on an elbow and kicked at the blood-stiffened leg of Jamie's jeans. "I'd kill for some polling figures. You've been outside. Is the public revolting yet?"

"Starving, anyway," Jamie said. "What happened to 'no civilians,' Malc?"

He regretted the words the instant they left his mouth, and the glare Malcolm gave him in response was banned under the Geneva Convention. More important and powerful men than Jamie had withered and died under the heat of those fucking eyes.

"There are," Malcolm said, "no more civilians."

"They're scared," Jamie replied. "And they should be, fuck, look in a fuckin' mirror some time. No offense, Malc, but you've been in a cell for four years. I've been out in the world, with them."

"Yeah," Malcolm said in a tone of voice that implied the exact opposite. "The terrorists brought the Regime to power, didn't they, but the fuckin' _civilians_ kept them there. It wouldn't take what I did to start them rioting otherwise."

"So it's fuck everyone else, then? Is that the new line?"

"When you were out there," Malcolm spat, "in the fucking world_,_ did ye happen to see the crowds lining the streets down to the docks, cheering on the deportations? When they raided the mosques and loaded everyone onto buses and liquidated the puir bastards? The good fuckin' people of Great Britain, Good fuckin' Germans…" His attention turned back to the tablet, downcast, as if the very act of arguing with Jamie was more exhausting than he could manage.

Jamie barely had the stomach for it either, even if he was right—which he _was,_ and the worst bit of it was that Malcolm obviously _knew_ he was right—and he wondered when, exactly, he'd lost the will to call out the old fucker when he was being an utter git. "You'd no' have been so callous before," he said.

Malcolm rubbed at the swollen joints of his hand. "You wouldn't have let me be."

He wasn't, Jamie thought, just talking about the riots. Malcolm never spoke of the last years of his personal reign of terror, and no one, least of all Jamie, wanted to risk an orchiectomy-by-rusty-screwdriver by asking him about it. There were no graceful exits from politics, and if Malcolm's final, inevitable implosion had been particularly spectacular, it was simply the nature of the game and the role he'd played in it. It was ridiculous to think that he'd never have spiralled out of control, never have fallen, if Jamie had still been there to rein him in.

"Aye," Jamie said. "I'm your fuckin' conscience, aren't I?"

"You'd like tae think so, ye wee psycho." The last bit of his sentence degenerated into a painful hacking fit. Jamie almost managed to stand, to get him water, he'd take water even if he'd not let Jamie touch him, before Malcolm seemed to recover enough to breathe again. "Fine. Right. What would you have me do, Jiminy fuckin' Cricket?"

He'd actually thought about it for about thirty seconds. "Send out the Piccadilly cell to deal with the riots." At Malcolm's raised eyebrow, he added, "If the fecal fest at Stockwell goes on much longer, they'll die anyway, or kill off Nicola's people, and she's right about no' bringing them here. We arm them, put them out between the troops and the neets."

"The Regime can replace troops," Malcolm said. "I ran the numbers. I mean, I'm a fuckin' press guy, not a military strategist, but Jamie, we can't win a war. Not even a guerrilla war."

"I dinnae mean for us to win," Jamie replied. "I mean for us tae be seen controlling a situation that the Regime cannae handle."

"Trot vanguardist bollocks."

"No' utter shite, though."

"No," Malcolm said. "Not utter shite."

"I'll go with them."

"The fuck you will. I need you here."

"You have Sam."

Malcolm was quiet, then. Serious, which had yet to stop being so unnerving. "She's a good girl. Loyal, and she'll do exactly as I say. So—" He couldn't be unaware of the effect he had on Jamie; it was as conscious and deliberate as any one of his television appearances, and still, it worked. "I need _you_."

"We'll talk it out later. After you've made Nicola say yes."

Malcolm made a sound that was more acknowledgment than it was agreement, and reached under a nearly flat pillow to retrieve something that, in the shadows, took a few seconds for Jamie to identify as his rosary. "It fell," Malcolm said, and allowed Jamie the very slightest instant of contact, a thumb's brush against the dry skin of his hand, as he passed it over. Jamie slid the beads through his fingers, smooth and cold and certain. "Don't go out there again. Not tonight."

Jamie didn't think that he could so much as make it back up to the top bunk, at least not until Malcolm kicked him off the bed. Not while, with a small army and what remained of the British political structure at his beck and call, he'd admitted, after all these years, to needing Jamie.

"I'm no' going anywhere," Jamie said firmly, and to his credit, completely meant it at the time.

* * *

Ollie arrived at the station early this time in the perverse hope of not being at a complete disadvantage, but Malcolm was, of course, already there, leaning against the crumbling tiles with his arms crossed over his skinny chest and one of the Resistance's silent Che Guevara postulants in a balaclava beside him. Ollie sidled up to him, aware of how exposed their faces were despite knowing with complete certainty that the obsolete cameras above them had ceased transmitting years ago.

"It wasn't easy getting away," Ollie told him. "If Lowell knew I had a jamming field I'd be in a black cell by now."

"Tell me you have something for me."

"He doesn't trust me. He wants to know why the Resistance is suddenly not getting soundly fucked on a regular basis."

"He knows why."

"He knows he won't get to you, not right away. He wants the leader."

"Of course he does. Tell him it's fuckin' Fatty."

"Fatty's been dead for two years, Malcolm."

"Tell him it's Jeremy Kyle's pickled left bollock running the show for all I care. Make something up; didn't that used to be your job? Look, _I_ don't know who the fuckin' leader is, no one knows, it's all rhizomes and fuckin' disorganization, and meanwhile you've no' given me anything useful."

"Okay," Ollie said. "Okay, fuck, there's this one thing. Lowell's been poking around DoCR—that's the Department of Citizenship and Resettlement—"

"DoSAC."

"Yeah, DoSAC, basically. There's something there he's found interesting and he's back and forth with a USB every few days."

"So what's at DoSA—DoCR, fuck me, that's a bad acronym. Gulags and letters of transit?"

"If so," Ollie replied, "They're at least more efficient about it than DoSAC ever was. It's the citizenship tracking, only I imagine that your lot can hack into the regular databases, so whatever's on that USB is sensitive enough that they don't want it on the network and important enough not to destroy."

"Can you get it?" As Ollie's mouth started to open, he snapped, "That wasn't a fuckin' question. Get it."

"Jesus, Malcolm." He smacked his head against the cracked glass of a "Terrorism: If You Suspect It, Report It" advertisement. "What do you think I am, exactly?"

"Ross Lowell's bumboy?"

"You wish. Don't you have people to go through his bins?" Ollie supposed that he'd been demoted to bin-forager; it wasn't like Malcolm needed to actually say it. "I'd be burned. If I managed it. I'd have to go underground like you and the rest of Dumbledore's Army."

"Who says we'd have you? We've got fuckin' standards."

"I'm your one link to the Regime and I'm not a link, Malcolm, I'm a paper-chain garland. I'm nothing. I want to bring them down as much as you do—" Malcolm glowered at him. "Okay, but I _do_ want to bring them down, but I'm not…I don't want to end up like _you_."

"There was a time when that was exactly what you wanted." Malcolm pushed off from the wall and started walking. The masked woman beside him—Sam? No, she was curvier and less gawky than Sam—didn't budge. "Bring me something real. I'll make it worth your while."

"Is this some kind of bribery pity fuck? You pimp out your soldiers now?"

Malcolm started walking, then looked over his shoulder at the woman. "No' exactly. You kids have fun, yeah? Betray me and you'll wish the Regime was tenderly shoving electrodes up your urethra."

Which was when the masked face finally turned towards Ollie, clear blue eyes and a whispered, "Yorkshire Tea," and a strand of blond hair finding its way loose from the black wool. It was only then that he realised he'd convinced himself that he'd never see her again, and he didn't even care that Malcolm was still there, that this was undoubtedly part of some complicated scheme; all he could think to do was wrap his arms around Emma and bury his face against the top of her head in relief. She pressed into him—God, he thought, she fit so well there, warm and solid and a reminder of a lifetime ago, when he'd almost been happy.

"Malcolm?"

Already walking away, his ratty coat flapping behind him, Malcolm muttered, "Soppy fuckin' cunts. At least wait until I'm gone." Then, echoing off the curved walls, into the gathering shadows: "_Someone_ should get what they want."

"We don't have much time," Emma said, and he knew she didn't mean this clandestine meeting, or all the ones that were to follow in the weeks to come. He wasn't a political genius—not, after all, Manchester's top Malcolm Tucker tribute band—but it didn't take one to spot the bloodbath looming on the horizon.

Later—and not much later—he'd have cause to wonder if, without the way her hands trembled as she lifted the edge of her mask, the way her lips parted before he'd even started speaking, it all might have ended differently. Whether this, despite what history would eventually record, was how the war had begun.

They'd played at coy long enough; outside, the wind howled, shaking the ceiling of the station. They weren't as young as they'd been, and he was tired. "Your flat," Ollie said. "Chinese takeaway in front of the telly and Phil and your brother complaining about all the sex noises."

"I don't," Emma replied, "actually want to think about Phil right now."

"Let's not, then," he said, and in the gloom of the deserted station, finally leaned in to kiss her.


	8. Restless For an Empire

Despite a frantic exchange of words—the vast majority of which Ofcom wouldn't have allowed on-air before 9 PM, and all of them delivered at a volume well above the range normally produced by human vocal chords—there wasn't much genuine discussion to be had. Jamie was leaving. All that remained to be decided was how violent the parting would be. So far, no one had thrown an actual punch, but then, it had only been a few hours since everyone'd met in the War Room, Malcolm had essentially dictated the new strategy, and Jamie had announced that he was, personally, leading the charge.

"Should we, I don't know, do something?"

Sam stretched her arms behind her head and looked up at her husband. The single mattress ought to have been too small for them, but hunger had winnowed them both down to the barest of parts, just bone and sinew until they fit like tongue-and-groove siding in a space meant for one. There was no privacy in the shelter—at the moment, Malcolm and Jamie were carrying on a shout that had begun in the War Room until Nicola had summoned a pair of bollocks from somewhere and told them both to piss off, migrated to the men's lavatory, and eventually wound up by the extractor fan, which did absolutely nothing to disguise the argument beyond making it even louder.

"Are you volunteering to get in the middle of _that_?" She had a headache, and it was all very draining to have to be more reasonable than everybody else. It wasn't as if she didn't also, on a regular basis, want to bury her considerable fear under a torrent of aggression, but revolution or not, a lifetime of conditioning to be publicly sweet and deferential, and privately fucking brilliant, wasn't all that easy to overcome, especially with Malcolm looming in the background for contrast. She didn't envy either him or Jamie, not with what they'd been through, but she wished, every so often, that she too could default to screaming at a problem until it went and fucked off.

"It's just that they're going to kill each other before the Regime gets either of them," Sundeep said.

"This is nothing." Sam, after all, had lived through the Great Tom Wobble of 2007, when they'd been genuinely angry at each other rather than terrified and trying—not very effectively—to hide it. "This is _foreplay_." At his look, she added, "_Metaphorically._ Jesus, get your mind out of the gutter. Malcolm's about two hundred years old and Jamie's a priest."

"Sounds like the premise of a supernatural romance to me_,_" Sundeep replied. "But for real, I think they're about ready to whip them out and see whose is longer."

She hit him with the pillow, and would have been tempted to snipe at him for suggesting anything untoward about her former boss, mentor, and the Last Decent Man in British Politics, and besides, the _mental image alone, _if she weren't so fucking scared. "Nicola should let me go instead. Jamie's not a soldier."

"Neither are you, love. But you've both done well enough so far."

The din of the All-Glaswegian Competitive Shouting Championship ground to an abrupt halt, and Sam sat up to peer, unnerved, down the long corridor of bunks.

"Which one d'you think's snuffed it?"

Before she could hazard a guess, Malcolm was storming down the cross tunnel, cold fury carved into his face. He would have gone right past the shelter, but she leapt up and caught the sleeve of his coat. He whirled, death in his pale eyes, and for an (albeit fleeting) instant she was half-afraid he was going to hit her.

"You talked him out of it?" Because that was the only way a disagreement with Malcolm ended, with the other poor fucker conceding, given that he could no longer have anyone sacked.

He shook his hand free and braced himself against the wall; a quick, furtive look to determine that it was only Sam in the cross tunnel, then the fight went out of him with a harsh exhale like air whistling out of a punctured balloon.

"He's _going_?"

"Tonight." Sam was sure that, in a hundred lifetimes she wouldn't get used to the omnipresent rasp in Malcolm's voice, or the despair. She didn't _want_ to get used to it. "Taking a handful of Nicola's most expendable redshirts to meet with the sorry self-annihilating cunts at Stockwell. We've reached critical levels of fuck if drunken sodomy with a pool cue counts as fuckin' military experience now."

"What'd he say to convince you?"

"Oh," Malcolm said. "Nothing. He just looks at me with those great big fuckin' baby blue eyes and I can't refuse him anything." Her embryonic smirk died stillborn under Malcolm's glare. Despite what she'd said to Sundeep, she suspected he wasn't entirely wrong about the dynamics at play. "Where's Free Gary? I need him to hack into DoSA—DoCR—for me."

"Here." Sundeep, and his laptop, were behind her. Had he overheard everything? She supposed it didn't matter; there were no proper secrets in the tunnels, at least not for long. "But Malcolm, I've looked at that stuff. There's not really—" He shifted his fingers over the computer's casing, leaving streaks of moisture despite the cold. "Right, then. Shall we?"

Two hours later, having commandeered the War Room yet again, Malcolm looked back up from the screen, bleary-eyed and, if it were possible, even more irritable than he had been before. It wasn't in Sam's job description anymore to bring him tea, and he'd be as likely as not to pitch a fit on her if she tried, but the temptation was strong enough that she clasped her hands tightly and sat down in one of the chairs beside him to stop herself.

"I think I'm getting a vibe."

"A vibe?" Sundeep asked, because he'd only met Malcolm a few weeks ago and didn't know any better.

"A supernatural fuckin' spidey-sense, kind of a tingling, a boring sort of déjà-fucking-vu, like the entire world has changed and yet here I remain, looking at another catastrophic DoSAC fuck-up." He poked at the keyboard as if it were a still-twitching bit of roadkill. "Does this make any sense to you, Sam? Does this—" He moved away, enough for her to see a spreadsheet of names, broken by stretches in dates that easily spanned months. "—look to you like the work of a government that makes the trains run on time?"

"They deleted something," Sundeep said.

"Yes they fuckin' deleted something! Fuck! What is it that Sam sees in you? These are the puir fuckers they had murdered, and they kept records of _those,_ so _who_ exactly did they fuckin' delete?"

"I don't know!"

"Get it back."

"I can't, Malcolm. I'm not a fucking wizard; this isn't _magic,_ it's IT. It's—probably it's what's on that USB that Reeder told you about, and the reason it's on a USB is to keep it out of the hands of people like us."

"You hacked a drone."

"Once, and then they changed the firmware. If I'm lucky enough, and it's on _a_ computer that I'm watching at one particular moment, _maybe_, I can see it if they put it on screen, but realistically—" He didn't need to go on; ancient as he was, Malcolm mostly understood how networks functioned.

"We need to physically go and get it," Sam said. "Break into DoCR."

"You wee delinquent. No, I'm no' having you die in that fuckin' fishbowl for what's probably just weapons-grade incompetence. We'll find another way." He frowned, stood up. Paced. For the first time since he'd marched into Nicola's War Room and taken up the helm of the Resistance, she was aware of just how old he looked, how weary and small, and it occurred to her that he might very well have no more idea of how to wage a war, let alone win one, than she did.

"Malcolm," Sam tried, and though she wasn't frightened of him—she was the one person in all the world who'd _never_ been frightened of him—she had an instinct for self-preservation common to all meat-based creatures, and said instinct most assuredly did not want her to finish the sentence. "You should go and be with Jamie. I'm worried about him, and—and you."

"Darlin'." His voice was gentle—well, as close as he got to gentle, which would be considered a venomous snarl for most people. "And I mean this in the nicest possible way—Jamie can get tae fuck. He wants to play tin soldiers with the BNP and get himself killed for the chavs and hoodies, I won't do him the courtesy of a tearful fuckin' farewell." He swept himself out of the room in a flap of moth-eaten wool and malice.

"That went well," Sundeep said.

Sam shook her head. "He'd _better_ fucking not get himself killed," she muttered, and wondered when it was, exactly, that she'd started to give a fuck about what happened to _Jamie_, of all people.

"I know how he feels."

"I don't think Jamie has feelings, exactly."

"Malcolm, I mean." She stared at him. "When you go. Like I can't even look at you, in case." He squeezed her forearm, and she leaned her head against his bony shoulder. They stayed like that for a long time.

* * *

A giant map of the city, the Exclusion Zones shaded in biro scribbles, lay over the table, the areas held by the Regime demarcated by outdated ration tickets, Jamie's army of Brixton detritus a scattering of sliced-up playing cards, the Resistance's own guerrilla cells represented by poker chips along the Underground lines. Malcolm tried to focus on whatever Barry was droning on about, but despite him being no more boring than any number of self-important cunts Malcolm had put in their place over the years, he kept drifting off, the sharp aches in his joints made all the worse by a pressure front building across a London sky he hadn't seen in over a month.

If Jamie were here, Malcolm might have passed him a note detailing exactly in which bit of the old Trot's anatomy he'd have liked to ram an ice-axe, but Jamie had been off for a week and was, by all accounts, proving to be as much of a festering wen on the Regime's arse as he'd been on Malcolm's. He might have even managed to make sense of the scrawls Malcolm—after painstaking, swear-ridden practice—could almost vaguely write with his left hand, a cipher which even Sam, flawless creature that she was, couldn't decode.

It was all so fucking _slow._ Back in the day, with Jamie on bin-and-long-lens duty, it'd have taken Malcolm no more than a few hours to determine from where any given member of the government was obtaining his nose-candy, who and what he was fucking, and how he could be disposed of with the minimal amount of fuss and collateral damage, at least where it concerned the handful of people about whom Malcolm gave a fuck. What was worse was that the Regime was thuggish, their state apparatus even more lethargic than the bloated bureaucratic machinery that they'd abolished in their crawl from the primordial muck of the _Daily Mail_ to the halls of Number 10, and in an even (if not fair, never fair) battle of politics, they'd never have stood a chance against him. They had no _right_, no legitimacy. Had they not been torturers and murderers, they'd still have no place at all in a game like his. And yet there they were, the nation beaten into cowed submission beneath them, and the vast might of their military-fucking-industrial complex aimed straight at Jamie.

One of the tablets, propped up by a pair of ancient and dusty dictionaries, showed, silently, a repeat of the Chancellor's latest address. Pre-recorded, of course, they couldn't have risked a repeat of Price-Callaghan. Malcolm noticed a definite blurring around his eyes and mouth that ironed out the creases, evened his skin tone, and filled out—almost imperceptibly to someone who hadn't spent a lifetime in public relations—his jaw. While tangible victories had been few and far between, he'd include among them this obvious bit of desperate high-tech interference. He ought to have been pleased, not just with the level to which Jamie was managing to keep London in flames, but with the resulting chaos which afforded Tim's more disciplined troops to launch rapid, tactical strikes that had, at last count, destroyed one of the Regime's weapons depots and damaged an army base. It was now apparent, at least, that the great pony-fucking Oswald Mosley clone was sleeping badly.

He should have been focused on the next move, but instead, he was thinking of the rosary left in the filthy chasm beneath his bunk, wondering, his chest tight for reasons unrelated to the scar tissue choking his upper respiratory system, where Jamie was hiding out between flashes of spasmodic nocturnal violence.

The night, the very fucking _instant_, he thought, that some flaccid Regime prick managed the lucky shot that took out the Resistance's answer to Wayne Rooney, they wouldn't be able to resist gloating. They'd drag his corpse (and Malcolm tried to avoid imagining Jamie dead, Jamie still for more than thirty seconds) down the middle of Oxford Street for all the surveillance drones to capture in lurid detail, splash it across every digital billboard in Piccadilly Circus, and moreover Malcolm would _know_, the loss would be tangible in every parched, malnourished cell in his shattered body, and that was the only reason _he_ ever slept at night at all.

Which was how he nearly missed Tim telling him that Jamie'd actually gotten a message through on one of the ancient telegraphs, that he was due back in a few days to restock the ammo supplies for his ragtag army of yobbos, and that Malcolm needed to convince him, while he was here, to pull back and regroup.

"What?" Nicola frowned at his obvious distraction, and Tim looked decidedly unhappy with both of them. There was an unease between the two of them that hadn't been there until Nicola had waffled over the Stockwell situation, and had intensified in the week of Jamie's Yob Blitzkrieg.

"I said to shorten Jamie's leash," Tim said. "He's out of control. The attacks are too localised, too predictable; he's doing well, but it's short-term at best. He's nipping at the Regime's ankles and they're better equipped. They'll just send in more tanks, or flatten every tower block in the area."

Malcolm pressed the heel of his palm to his forehead. "What the _fuck_," he said, slowly, because the man clearly _was_ a moron if he thought Jamie was out of control _now_, "makes you think that Jamie'll listen to anything I say?"

"He's doing all this under your orders, isn't he?" Tim leaned forward in his chair, and Malcolm wasn't imagining his body language; he was deliberately cutting off Nicola's sightlines, talking past her, making it evident that she was no longer calling the shots. It might have been true, but any coup d'état would be Malcolm's decision, not fucking Tim's. "I mean, if _Nicola—" _

"If Nicola what?" She might have been a yawning black hole that sucked in political savvy and regurgitated a condensed torrent of feel-good cradle-to-grave pabulum, but even she couldn't fail to detect the mutiny bubbling around the table.

"I'm just saying that perhaps Malcolm's better equipped to deal with, ah,issues of particular sensitivity when it comes to military logistics."

"Nicola, what do you actually think about all this?" Sam asked, and Nicola was flustered, spluttered out some gibberish that wouldn't have passed muster at a press conference, and Malcolm inwardly groaned. He let the rest of them natter on—deadly bores, all of them, all except Sam—until they'd run out of traction, let them clear the room before pulling Nicola aside for a word in the ladies loo. Two underfed punkish girls exiting the stalls gave him sidelong stares, and he snapped at them to respect his identity and lifestyle choices, then hissed to Nicola, "The army wanker."

"What about him?"

"Watch your back, darlin', because he's got a great fuckin' Tomahawk missile aimed at it."

She dragged her hand through strands of hair. She'd gone grey at the roots. Miracle she'd been able to keep up the dye job in the first place, when there was so little of everything else. But it looked good, he thought; artifice didn't become her, and she at least wore her age better than he did.

"Don't you think I haven't noticed?" Elbows on the sink, she evaluated her reflection—critically, if he were to guess. He tried his best to avoid his own. "It might be for the best."

"It would fucking not be."

She turned to him, tilted her face up. "No one's ever taken me seriously, not in my whole career. Whenever they started to, you made sure—"

"I didn't need tae do anything. Look, pet, you're a fuckin' joke, you always have been, but he's a dripping arseplug in khakis and I won't oust one junta just to set up another one. So fuckin' take control."

"You do know how to give a pep talk, Malcolm," Nicola said with a wan smile. "But Tim's right—you do need to do something about Jamie. It's not just his own life at stake anymore."

He might have once relished her misery, but he must have been turning sentimental in his dotage because he couldn't manage to point out that _she'd_ rubber-stamped Jamie's scheme, not him, and it was hardly his fault if their feral pitbull had turned out to have rabies in addition to his myriad personality disorders.

And if the thought of Jamie blown to pieces, or worse, imprisoned in the same pitch-black, piss-stank oubliette where they'd stashed him for the last three years wasn't a coiling tentacle of fear snaking beneath his ribcage, he'd have argued that a dead revolutionary hero might do wonders for their public image. He'd throw someone else ahead of that particular oncoming train, though, Nicola herself if he had to, before he'd contemplate anything happening to Jamie.

"He's due Tuesday?" Malcolm said, and he _wouldn't _be relieved at that, because nothing was going to happen to Jamie anyway. Jamie was immortal, he was Keith fucking Richards and Marmite and that jellyfish that could re-spawn itself for all eternity. "I'll ready the gaffer tape and the cattle prod. He'll see reason."

Later, lying in bed listening to the low buzz of CNN—Stephen Fry, poster boy for the new English Diaspora, interviewed by Anderson Cooper, the two of them prattling on in concerned tones about international sanctions and human rights abuses, Gordon Deitrich resurrected to bemoan the sorry state of Beyond Buggered Britain—he let his hand drop a few centimeters from the floor, close enough to feel the dust gathered there, where he had deliberately not moved Jamie's rosary from its latest resting place. The springs bursting through the thin mattress dug into his spine, and he tossed on his side, trying to ignore the various protestations of his body enough to just pass out. He longed to return to his too-large, too-empty house, painted decorator-white by his ex-wife and full of books he'd never had the time to read. It was in a neighbourhood that was an Exclusion Zone now, Sam had said. Even if the Regime fell tomorrow, it'd remain contaminated for years, decades perhaps, behind barbed wire and radiation signs, a silent shrine to the horrors of chemical weapons and to the abandoned shell of the London-that-was.

Tuesday would come before that. He told himself he could wait that long.

* * *

Ollie woke in fits and starts, the absence of daylight and an alarm conspiring to keep him unconscious for as long as possible, the dead weight of another sleeping body on his arm, and how long had it been since _that_ had happened? His hip and ribs ached where they met the coat spread out between them and the cold surface of the platform, and he tightened his other arm around Emma's slim waist, for a moment, reveling in the very physicality of her, the two brown moles on her shoulder blade, her long length of smooth neck. She stirred, rolled onto her back, wincing from stiff muscles, yawning.

"Morning," he said, hoping that was at least still accurate, and she scrambled up, reaching for her black jumper.

"Morning, oh—" Emma checked her watch, then frantically started pulling on layers of clothing and brushing dust from her knees. "Fuck, _fuck!_"

He thought that, of the two of them, he had the right to be more nervous, given which one of them was working at a subcontract for the Ministry of Love, but she was clearly in a state.

"Malcolm's going to kill me," Emma said, and before Ollie could entirely bite back the reflex to be spiteful, he replied, "Yes, scamper on back to Daddy. Did you miss curfew again?" She gave him the martyred eye roll honed to perfection by generations of harried sit-com housewives. "Sorry, fuck, that wasn't—look, I just don't completely appreciate that our relationship is actually a threesome with a sweary, anorexic psychopath."

There was a long, and by no means comfortable, pause before she said, "It's a _relationship _now?"

"I, uh, I have to get going too, actually. There's the Stasi to run and all that."

"_Ollie._"

"…is it? I mean, do you…?"

She bent down, one hand braced on his coat, the other snaking through hair that no doubt looked like something out of _Eraserhead_, and brought her lips close to his ear. "You first."

He barely stopped to consider it. He liked to think that he had an impressive track record with women—certainly in comparison to everyone he'd ever worked with, and even most of his friends from university. He'd not have thought to elevate what they'd had beyond cross-aisle espionage and, let's face it, some incredibly passionate and inventive shagging, but the war made some things so much more urgent, lent weight where, perhaps, it should never have fallen, and wouldn't have otherwise. "Emma. Fuck. You're going to ask that _now_?"

Emma snorted. "We're carrying on in the bloody Underground with a murderous totalitarian government and Guy Fucks both breathing down our necks. Can you think of a better time?"

All he could think was that she was fucking beautiful. No makeup—and not the kind of no makeup that well-bred girls worked at to make their boyfriends think they weren't trying, either—sleep caking her eyelashes and soot from the tunnels smudged on her cheek, dressed in some bloke's cast-offs that sagged over her shoulders, and he wondered if this woman, resilient and brave and a little earthy, who'd have ever guessed that, had been hiding under that Tory power suit all along.

"Hey," Ollie said, and caught her chin to lift her face. "Hey, when all this is over, we'll do the whole bit properly, yeah? Five-star hotel and candles and we'll order in, because rice is—anyway."

"Because Malcolm wants it?" she asked, a note of posh-girl sulk lingering in her voice.

"Because I do," Ollie said. "Jesus, Emma, anyone would." He stood up, reached out an arm that she didn't need to climb to her feet. His coat looked trampled on; he'd have to find a way to shed it before he reached the office. "But I have to go now, I'm sorry, they will actually—"

"I know." She pulled him close, her kiss this time sharp and more than a little desperate. "Be safe, Ollie."

"I always end up on top, don't I?"

"You book us that room," she said, grinning, "and we'll find out, won't we?"

* * *

He made it into the lobby, barely, and then the grey swarm was upon him, polite and formal as befitted one of their own, the little fake stammering, "oh, so awfully sorry, Mr. Reeder" for barking his elbow as they shoved him into the back of a car.

Twenty-four hours ago they'd answered to him. Now, he supposed he should be grateful that they kept up appearances and didn't go as far as yanking a canvas sack over his head.

Anyway, it wasn't as if it mattered where they were going, or whether he'd be able to find the way back. He had every sense that it wasn't that sort of trip.

"Lowell's orders?" Ollie asked, but neither of the men in the front seat replied. He evaluated the position of the locks on the doors relative to the great slabs of Aryan übermensch on either side of him, calculated that he didn't have time to scramble over them and throw himself out of the moving car before one of the bastards went for a gun.

It'd be a quiet delivery, then. He supposed they wanted to question him first (and fuck's sake, he wasn't Malcolm, no one would rescue him) or he'd be dead already. It was the strangest sort of hope, even knowing what lay ahead, that he'd draw breath for a little while longer.

He checked his watch. If they hadn't followed him from Vauxhall Station, Emma would have probably had time to get away. She had to have.

They pulled up in front of Lowell's house, and he was flooded with palpable relief; whatever they planned to do with him couldn't wreck the propaganda minister's slip-covered furniture and his white carpets. Still, the men kept to either side of him, effectively ensuring that he couldn't make a break for it.

Lowell was sitting, hands folded on his lap, watching a projection from his mobile. A small cluster of kids, distinguished only by their clothes from the line of rebels providing covering fire behind them, tipped over a police carrier while others dragged burning boards from where they were nailed to shop windows into the streets.

"Very 2011," Ollie said.

"I forget how young you are," Lowell replied. "I watched this the first time round, on the telly, back in the 80s."

"I did warn you." Though Lowell wasn't smiling, wasn't offering him illegal wine or forced jocularity, Ollie felt slightly more confident about his prospects for surviving the day. "You've literally got an entire generation with nothing to do but play _Grand Theft Auto_, get into pub fights, and fantasise about how they'd survive a zombie apocalypse, and now you've given them a dictatorship to fight and Jamie Macdonald to lead them."

"On the contrary," Lowell said. "He's done us all a favour." He switched the display to a map of the Tube, the riots a red flare below the Thames. "We've known about the Underground, of course, where else could they hide for any extended period of time? The attacks were scattered before, but these riots are concentrated. We know the stations now, and the closest deep-level shelters where most of the terrorists are housed. All we need to worry about now is the timing of the air strikes."

"Air strikes." His fingertips pushed in to the arms of the chair, a shade less pale than the fabric. He took long, slow breaths, determined to stay calm, to not give himself away if such a thing was even possible anymore. "You'll kill hundreds. Thousands."

Lowell continued to calmly stare ahead at the projection. "A rebellion is a cancer," he said, his tone even, mollifying, while Ollie's heart pounded so hard he was certain the other man could hear. "You'd cut off a gangrenous limb, to spare the rest of a body."

_Emma_, he thought, _oh fucking hell, Emma,_ and the blood rushing past his ears beat out a rapid snare, burying beneath it any thoughts of self-preservation. It didn't matter, he thought, if he lived one more day or a handful more; Lowell _knew,_ and he wasn't going to be allowed past the doors of his office, wasn't going to be allowed to live his double life. Something base in him, something animal, urged him to run. "You can't do this. It's not—you want _order_, Ross, _peace_, you can't just—"

"Weber's already done it," Lowell said, "I've saved you a front-row seat."

His hand moved to tap the mobile, and that was when Ollie lurched forward, spilling a bowl of nuts on the side table and more by luck than dexterity, snatched the 'phone from its resting place. He barely even had time to think before he was running, and Lowell didn't so much as dignify his too-little, too-late attempt at defiance by giving chase, merely calling behind him, "You're making a huge mistake."

Stumbling, half-crawling as gunshots shattered the gilded antique mirror in the foyer, clutching the mobile, he somehow made it through the front door and into the sludge-drenched road with Lowell's security firing after him. He had just enough time to see them gaining on him, to think that he was going to die, shot in a ditch, not yet thirty-five years old and having done exactly one decent thing in his entire life, which wouldn't even matter and about which no one would ever know, when a car careened around the bend in the road, tyres squealing. He was yanked into the back as the man in the passenger side leaned out the window and fired in a wide arc at the oncoming guards.

Ollie crashed hard against the backseat as the car swerved, blinking up into the balaclava-covered face of one of his rescuers. From the shattered rear window, he could see one of the guards, his face bloodied, still standing in the middle of the road, but the man at the wheel drove like a maniac while the one beside him shot at a flurry of drones taking up the pursuit that human security had failed.

The one in the passenger seat with the AK-47 and, the second he craned around to face Ollie, unmistakably large eyes, said, "If you've still got a signal jammer, now'd be a good time tae turn it on."

"Jamie."

White teeth filled the little gap in his mask. Below its rim, the rectangle of his priest's collar was just barely visible. "Right. Who's the nice Scot now, then?"

"How did you even—" he started, then, "Emma."

"Slipped a tracking device in yer coat pocket on yer first date." He made a disappointed noise. "You work in surveillance, you gigantic ponce. You shoulda seen it coming. That way," he added, the last bit to the driver. "We'll have tae ditch the car and split up."

Granted a stay of execution, Ollie managed to gasp out, "Jamie. We—we need to keep driving. They're going to bomb the station. Wherever it is you're hiding, Lowell knows. He's already—we have to warn them."

From the front seat, he could practically see the waves of fury radiating from every pore in Jamie's body, Silver Age comic-style, too much pure, visceral violence to be contained within the mere cage of his skin. "Get me tae somewhere with one of those fuckin' telegraph things. Fastest route; if they come after us, we shoot our way out. _Now_!" He grabbed Ollie's shoulders, the front seatback the only thing shielding him from being throttled by a rage-drunk madman. "Listen tae me. Are ye fuckin' listening?" Ollie nodded. He couldn't speak; if Lowell had been frightening as he calmly proposed flattening an entire neighbourhood, Jamie—who'd been wasted behind a desk, who'd been granted a sort of perverse, unchecked freedom by the Regime, and who, Ollie strongly suspected, had spent his entire life with the hazy understanding that a situation would someday arise in which he might be called upon to murder and maim with impunity—was much, much worse. "It wasnae my decision tae rescue ye. I dinnae like you, but Malcolm thought your life might be worth something. You live and die by his whim, understand? And if anything's happened—"

"I get it," Ollie said.

"Then," Jamie told him, "welcome tae the fuckin' Underground."

The car screeched to a halt, and Jamie, rifle in one hand, shouting at his companions to fuck off or cause a distraction or blow something up, grabbed Ollie by the collar and dragged him through twisted metal gates strewn across the entrance to the station like the ribcage of an ancient behemoth. Ollie had the advantage of a longer stride, but he was panting for breath by the time Jamie kicked in the door of a maintenance cupboard and sat heavily in front of a WWII telegraph machine. Ollie hung back and watched him hammer at the keys, then, apparently satisfied, lean back in his chair, peel off his balaclava, and swipe his forearm across sweaty tangles of hair. He shed several layers of military surplus, adjusted the white rectangle at his throat, and attempted to arrange himself into something that resembled a human being.

Ollie thought to mention it, then. "I have his mobile."

Jamie's crazed eyes looked past him for a moment, focussed; he blinked at the small device in Ollie's hand that had somehow managed to escape being lost or crushed in their escape. He uncoiled from his seat, picked up the mobile, and laughed for several long and incredibly disturbing seconds.

"What now?"

"Now we jack another car and get tae Clapham North."

"Is that where—"

Jamie nodded. "I warned them, they'll know, they'll manage tae get out," and he sounded so frantic that Ollie momentarily forgot to be afraid of him. "Come _on._"

He shouldn't have been at all surprised at Jamie's facility with hotwiring cars—the man was the closest Ollie'd ever met to a born criminal—but something about the priest get-up made it inherently jarring. "What's with—"

Jamie gestured up at a mural splayed across the burned-out shell of a nearby car park. Ollie had seen several like it in the weeks since the riots had begun—a Bansky-style stencil of a masked man facing down a tank. The Regime did its best to paint over them as soon as they appeared, but they proliferated across the city nonetheless, an attempt by someone, somewhere, to turn the mindless violence into a genuine uprising.

"They're looking for _that_ cunt," he said. "No' a respectable man of the cloth." The car spluttered to life, and they were moving again, almost slow enough to be below suspicion, but it must have worked; the drones he could see took no special interest in their stolen vehicle, in the Resistance's firebrand and his entirely unconvincing piety.

Somewhere above the thick cover of cloud, Ollie could hear the rumble of jets.

"…Jamie."

"I _know._ Shut it, ye poofter, I'm trying tae _think._"

"—poofter, right, _one_ of us has shagged a woman in the past three years—"

"Aye, a Tory, anyway. That's almost like a woman." He shook his head. "Och," he said, "fuck it," and gunned the engine as hard as he could. Ollie was flung once again against the seat, clawing himself back to upright to gape at the maniac behind the wheel. Rain lashed against the windscreen, building to hail, and the car hydroplaned, veering in and out of the lane. There was no one to be seen as they made their approach, and Ollie tried to convince himself that maybe everyone had left, that the blocks of low-rises and houses and shops were each one deserted.

He saw the jet as it dove low, just above the rooftops, spilling its black cargo against the slate-grey sky.

Jamie slammed on the brake, nearly broke the handle of the door before he realised it was locked, before he was standing in the drowned street, the wind's howl swallowing the whistle as, one by one, the bombs reached the surface. Ollie wrestled him back behind the car, choking on ash and heat, as the pavement buckled under them, every brick and window shuddering and heaving and straining to break free of its moorings. Jamie squirmed wildly, screamed and thrashed in his arms, promised to tear Ollie limb from limb if he didn't let go, then at last, as the flames and smoke erupted from the grim concrete silo of the station, clung boneless to the crumpled side of the car while the rain, cold and impervious, fell all around them.


End file.
